Queer creolization in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco

2019 ◽  
pp. 131-150
Author(s):  
Gigi Adair
Keyword(s):  
Community Formation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Diasporic Community ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean

This chapter argues that Chamoiseau’s sidestepping of the logic of biological kinship and genealogical lineage works to subvert the repeated invocation of Martinique’s ties to the “motherland,” France, thus enabling the diasporic and dialogic subjectivities of creolité. The novel offers a history of diasporic community formation on Martinique which questions and finally resists the demand for filiation, just as it does without the trope of motherhood. This reading of Chamoiseau’s novel also allows for a reconsideration of debates over creolization and Édouard Glissant’s notion of relationality, both of which have received renewed and increased attention, including in the anglosphere, in recent years. In order to make creolization useful for a queer postcolonial and diasporic critique, I argue that creolization must also be understood as a displacement from normative, national kinship, and that this then feeds back into recent debates on creolization as a global process, not one restricted to the Caribbean.

A House for Mr Biswas and the Theory of the West Indian Novel

2020 ◽  
pp. 31-80
Author(s):  
William Ghosh
Keyword(s):  
West Indian ◽  
The Novel ◽  
George Lamming ◽  
The West ◽  
Kamau Brathwaite ◽  
Cultural Sovereignty ◽  
Novel Theory ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter is about the novel form in the West Indies in the 1960s. The novel, in this period, was a key site in which debates about decolonization, originality, and cultural sovereignty took place. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas was central to this debate. It responds to a history of West Indian novels and novel theory, and became an influential text in novels, criticism, and social theory in the region. Work by George Lamming, Kamau Brathwaite, and Sylvia Wynter is discussed in detail. By tracing the changing reception of A House for Mr Biswas in the Caribbean through the 1960s, we can also trace changing ideas and priorities in Caribbean social thought.

“What Freedom?”

2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-331
Author(s):  
John Owen Havard
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Free Condition ◽  
Narrative Design ◽  
Economic Liberalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
John Owen

John Owen Havard, “‘What Freedom?’: Frankenstein, Anti-Occidentalism, and English Liberty” (pp. 305–331) “If he were vanquished,” Victor Frankenstein states of his monstrous creation in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), “I should be a free man.” But he goes on: “Alas! what freedom? such as the peasant enjoys when his family have been massacred before his eyes, his cottage burnt, his lands laid waste, and he is turned adrift, homeless, pennyless, and alone, but free.” Victor’s circumstances approximate the deracinated subject of an emergent economic liberalism, while looking to other destitute and shipwrecked heroes. Yet the ironic “freedom” described here carries an added charge, which Victor underscores when he concludes this account of his ravaged condition: “Such would be my liberty.” This essay revisits the geographic plotting of Frankenstein: the digression to the East in the nested “harem” episode, the voyage to England, the neglected episode of Victor’s imprisonment in Ireland, and the creature’s desire to live in South America. Locating Victor’s concluding appeal to his “free” condition within the novel’s expansive geography amplifies the political stakes of his downfall, calling attention to not only his own suffering but the wider trail of destruction left in his wake. Where existing critical accounts have emphasized the French Revolution and its violent aftermath, this obscures the novel’s pointed critique of a deep and tangled history of English liberty and its destructive legacies. Reexamining the novel’s geography in tandem with its use of form similarly allows us to rethink the overarching narrative design of Frankenstein, in ways that disrupt, if not more radically dislocate, existing rigid ways of thinking about the novel.

White Zombie as Captivity Narrative and the Death of Certainty

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 19-25
Author(s):  
Mark C Anderson
Keyword(s):  
American Indians ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
Captivity Narrative ◽  
Early American ◽  
Arts And Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Black ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
American Society ◽  
Black Other

Horror films such as White Zombie (1932) reveal viewers to themselves by narrating in the currency of audience anxiety. Such movies evoke fright because they recapitulate fear and trauma that audiences have already internalized or continue to experience, even if they are not aware of it. White Zombie’s particular tack conjures up an updated captivity narrative wherein a virginal white damsel is abducted by a savage Other. The shell of the captivity story, of course, is as old as America. In its earliest incarnation it featured American Indians in the role as savage Other, fiendishly imagined as having been desperate to get their clutches on white females and all that hey symbolized. In this way, it generated much of the emotional heat stoking Manifest Destiny, that is, American imperial conquest both of the continent and then, later, as in the case of Haiti, of the Caribbean Basin. White Zombie must of course be understood in the context of the American invasion and occupation of Haiti (1915-1934). As it revisits the terrain inhabited by the American black Other, it also speaks to the history of American slavery. The Other here is African-American, not surprisingly given the date and nature of American society of the day, typically imagined in wildly pejorative fashion in early American arts and culture. This essay explores White Zombie as a modified captivity narrative, pace Last of the Mohicans through John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), the Rambo trilogy (1982, 1985, 1988), the Taken trilogy (2008, 1012, 2014), even Mario and Luigi’s efforts to rescue Princess Peach from Bowser.

Reading Statelessness

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyndsey Stonebridge
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Political Sovereignty ◽  
History Of

Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the failure of human rights to address statelessness is well known. Less commented upon is how important literature was to her thought. This chapter shows how Arendt’s 1940s essays on Kafka connect the history of the novel to shifting definitions of legal and political sovereignty. Arendt reads The Castle as a blueprint for a political theory that is also a theory of fiction: in the novel K, the unwanted stranger, demolishes the fiction of the rights of man, and with it, the fantasy of assimilation. In a parallel move, Kafka also refuses to assimilate his character into the conventions of fiction. Arendt’s reading changes the terms for how we might approach the literature of exile and of human rights.

V.S. Naipaul, Caribbean Writing, and Caribbean Thought

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Ghosh
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Development ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Derek Walcott ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Kamau Brathwaite ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
History Of ◽  
Principal Subject ◽  
Intellectual Formation

This book presents a new portrait of V.S. Naipaul, one of the twentieth-century’s most controversial writers about colonialism and its aftermath, by looking at his relationship with the Caribbean, the region of his birth. It argues that whilst Naipaul presented himself as a global public intellectual—a citizen of nowhere—his writing and thought was shaped by his Caribbean intellectual formation, and his investment in Caribbean political debates. Focusing on three key forms of Caribbean writing—the novel, the historical narrative, and the travel narrative—it shows how the generic, stylistic, and formal choices of writers had great political significance. Telling the story of his creative and intellectual development at three crucial points in Naipaul’s career, it offers a new intellectual biography of its principal subject. By showing Naipaul’s crucial place in the history of Caribbean ideas, it also provides new perspectives on a number of major writers and thinkers from the region, including C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, Kamau Brathwaite, Sylvia Wynter, George Lamming, Derek Walcott, Maryse Condé, and David Scott.

The Oxford History of the Novel in English

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
English Language ◽  
Book History ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

Volume Nine of this series traces the development of the ‘world novel’, that is, English-language novels written throughout the world, beyond Britain, Ireland, and the United States. Focusing on the period up to 1950, the volume contains survey chapters and chapters on major writers, as well as chapters on book history, publishing, and the critical contexts of the work discussed. The text covers periods from renaissance literary imaginings of exotic parts of the world like Oceania, through fiction embodying the ideology and conventions of empire, to the emergence of settler nationalist and Indigenous movements and, finally, the assimilations of modernism at the beginnings of the post-imperial world order. The book, then, contains chapters on the development of the non-metropolitan novel throughout the British world from the eighteenth to the mid twentieth centuries. This is the period of empire and resistance to empire, of settler confidence giving way to doubt, and of the rise of indigenous and post-colonial nationalisms that would shape the world after World War II.

Restoration Theatre and the Novel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Davidson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Transition ◽  
Strong Affinity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Restoration Theatre ◽  
Restoration Comedy ◽  
London Stage

This chapter explores the broad cultural transition from drama to novel during the Restoration period, which triggered one of the most productive periods in the history of the London stage. However, when it comes to the eighteenth century proper, the novel is more likely to be identified as the century's most significant and appealing popular genre. The chapter considers why the novel has largely superseded drama as the literary form to which ambitious and imaginative literary types without a strong affinity for verse writing would by default have turned their attention and energies by the middle of the eighteenth century. Something important may have been lost in the broad cultural transition from drama to novel. This chapter, however, contends that many things were preserved: that the novel was able to absorb many of the functions and techniques not just of Restoration comedy but of the theatre more generally.

An Essay on the Origins of the Novel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Whitmarsh
Keyword(s):  
Single Point ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Scholarship

This chapter discusses the history of scholarship trying to trace the origins of the novel, and the impossibility of attempting to pin down a single point of origination.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document