Magical Thinking in Chamoiseau’s Chemin-d’école

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 16-30
Author(s):  
Lucy Swanson
Keyword(s):  
Essential Difference ◽  
Magical Thinking ◽  
The West ◽  
Civilizing Mission ◽  
False Dichotomy ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Magical Beliefs

This essay examines the second installment of Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau’s trilogy Une enfance créole, using Chemin-d’école to consider how writers from the Caribbean may deploy magic in their texts in alternative ways to the magical realist mode, which critics have argued often reinforces a false dichotomy between a rational “West” and its irrational “others.” Specifically, Chamoiseau’s memoir both portrays creole magical beliefs as a vehicle through which its school-aged protagonists resist the ideology of neocolonial pedagogies, and it consistently refers to aspects of French civilization through the lens of the magical or marvelous. Ultimately, this essay argues, Chemin-d’école looks beyond magical motifs as mere emblems of tradition or authenticity. Using them instead to portray the neocolonial “civilizing mission” as its own form of magical thinking, the narration destabilizes the very ideas of the essential difference of Caribbean cultures and of the purported rationality of the West.

scholarly journals Enduring Legacies of Empire: A Case Study of a Preservice Teacher's Feminist Resistance

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yvonne Brown
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experiences ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
The West ◽  
Civilizing Mission ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
Memory Experience ◽  
The Caribbean

  Drawing on lived experiences and recent literature, especially, research by Nurse, a University of the West Indies academic, this article shows how memory, experience, place and history can reveal continuities in the civilizing mission of colonial and imperial projects. In order to validate my major claims, I excerpt a vignette from my published memoir regarding personal experiences at a predominantly, male teacher’s college in Jamaica (1962-1965). At the college, I deliberately engaged in a complex set of oppositional and strategic performances which led to my becoming the student of the year when I graduated. In a larger context, such performances are strategies which assertive women may wish to adopt, in order to disrupt the hegemony of male dominated educational institutions in Canada and the Caribbean.

Caribbean French-African Creole and African Metaphysics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanétha Vété-Congolo
Keyword(s):  
African Language ◽  
The West ◽  
French Empire ◽  
African Languages ◽  
The World ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Per Se

The Euro-enslavement enterprise in America expanded the European geography temporarily, and, more lastingly, its culturo-linguistic and philosophical influence. The deportation of millions of Africans within that enterprise similarly extended the African presence in this part of the world, especially in the Caribbean. Africans deported by the French Empire spoke languages of the West Atlantic Mande, Kwa, or Voltaic groups. They arrived in their new and final location with their languages. However, no African language wholly survived the ordeal of enslavement in the Caribbean. This signals language as perhaps the most important political and philosophical instrument of colonization. I am therefore interested in “Pawòl,” that is, the ethical, human, and humanist responses Africans brought to their situation through language per se and African languages principally. I am also interested in the metaphysical value of “Pawòl.”

Levantine Art in the “Orientalizing” Period

2019 ◽  
pp. 369-383
Author(s):  
Marian H. Feldman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Relations ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
The West ◽  
False Dichotomy ◽  
First Millennium

The “Orientalizing period” represents a scholarly designation used to describe the eighth and seventh centuries bce when regions in Greece, Italy, and farther west witnessed a flourishing of arts and cultures attributed to contact with cultural areas to the east—in particular that of the Phoenicians. This chapter surveys Orientalizing as an intellectual and historiographic concept and reconsiders the role of purportedly Phoenician arts within the existing scholarly narratives. The Orientalizing period should be understood as a construct of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship that was structured around a false dichotomy between the Orient (the East) and the West. The designation “Phoenician” has a similarly complex historiographic past rooted in ancient Greek stereotyping that has profoundly shaped modern scholarly interpretations. This chapter argues that the luxury arts most often credited as agents of Orientalization—most prominent among them being carved ivories, decorated metal bowls, and engraved tridacna shells—cannot be exclusively associated with a Phoenician cultural origin, thus calling into question the primacy of the Phoenicians in Orientalizing processes. Each of these types of objects appears to have a much broader production sphere than is indicated by the attribute as Phoenician. In addition, the notion of unidirectional influences flowing from east to west is challenged, and instead concepts of connectivity and networking are proposed as more useful frameworks for approaching the problem of cultural relations during the early part of the first millennium bce.

HURRICANES, CROPS, AND CAPITAL: THE METEOROLOGICAL INFRASTRUCTURE OF AMERICAN EMPIRE IN THE WEST INDIES

2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 418-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jamie L. Pietruska
Keyword(s):  
West Indian ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Empire ◽  
The West ◽  
Knowledge Infrastructure ◽  
Military Security ◽  
Symbolic Extension ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Weather Service

This article examines the mutually reinforcing imperatives of government science, capitalism, and American empire through a history of the U.S. Weather Bureau's West Indian weather service at the turn of the twentieth century. The original impetus for expanding American meteorological infrastructure into the Caribbean in 1898 was to protect naval vessels from hurricanes, but what began as a measure of military security became, within a year, an instrument of economic expansion that extracted climatological data and produced agricultural reports for American investors. This article argues that the West Indian weather service was a project of imperial meteorology that sought to impose a rational scientific and bureaucratic order on a region that American officials considered racially and culturally inferior, yet relied on the labor of local observers and Cuban meteorological experts in order to do so. Weather reporting networks are examined as a material and symbolic extension of American technoscientific power into the Caribbean and as a knowledge infrastructure that linked the production of agricultural commodities in Cuba and Puerto Rico to the world of commodity exchange in the United States.

Caribbean Commission

1952 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 136-136
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
West Indian ◽  
Virgin Islands ◽  
The West ◽  
The Caribbean

The thirteenth session of the Caribbean Commission was held in the Virgin Islands from October 29 to November 3,1951, with Ward M. Canaday (United States) presiding. Items on the agenda included the budget for 1952, consideration of special reports and recommendations, and preparation for the fifth session of the West Indian Conference scheduled to be held in Jamaica in 1952.

Slavery and Christianity in the British West Indies

1950 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 171-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Worthington Smith
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
British West Indies ◽  
The West ◽  
The Caribbean

Slavery in the British Empire was always centered in the British West Indies. To a greater degree than in the Southern Thirteen Colonies, economic life in the West Indies depended upon Negro slavery, and the population of the islands soon became predominantly Negro. With the loss of the Thirteen Colonies after 1775, slavery within the British Empire became almost entirely confined to the Caribbean colonies. Until the emancipation of the slaves in 1833, British eyes were focused upon the West Indies whenever slavery was mentioned.

An English Library at Trinidad, 1633

1955 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-41
Author(s):  
Eleanor B. Adams
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
West Indian ◽  
The West ◽  
The Third ◽  
Caribbean Area ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
El Dorado ◽  
Short Time

The island of Trinidad was discovered by Columbus on the third voyage in 1498. One of the largest and most fertile of the West Indian islands, for many years it remained on the fringe of European activity in the Caribbean area and on the coasts of Venezuela and Guiana. A Spanish settlement was founded there in 1532, but apparently it disintegrated within a short time. Toward the end of the sixteenth century Berrio and Raleigh fought for possession of the island, but chiefly as a convenient base for their rival search for El Dorado, or Manoa, the Golden Man and the mythical city of gold. Throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries explorers, corsairs, and contraband traders, Spanish, French, English, and Dutch, passed near its shores, and many of them may well have paused there to refresh themselves and to make necessary repairs to their vessels. But the records are scanty and we know little of such events or of the settlements that existed from time to time.

Caribbean Commission

1949 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 166-166
Keyword(s):  
Dominican Republic ◽  
United Nations ◽  
West Indies ◽  
West Indian ◽  
The West ◽  
French West Indies ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The United Nations

The third session of the West Indian Conference opened at Guadeloupe, French West Indies on December 1, 1948 and closed on December 14, after considering policy to be followed by the Caribbean Commission for the next two years. The Conference was attended by two delegates from each of the fifteen territories within the jurisdiction of the commission and observers invited by the commission from Haiti, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and the United Nations and its specialized agencies.

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