Books in the New World Studies series

From Zora Neale Hurston to Derek Walcott to Toni Morrison, New World black authors have written about African-derived religious traditions and spiritual practices. The Sacred Act of Reading examines religion and sociopolitical power in modern and contemporary texts of a variety of genres from the black Americas.

This work presents links between the myth of Caribbean Paradise and colonial ideologies and economics. It considers the cultural, economic and social effects of tourism's contemporary Caribbean and explores the way post colonial writers have responded to the paradise-plantation dichotomy.

Examining three turning points that shaped exceptionalism in both Americas - the late colonial and early Republican period, expansion into the frontier, and the Cold War - John Ochoa pursues literary travellers across landscapes and centuries.

Examines a group of early nineteenth-century novels by white creoles, writers whose identities and perspectives were shaped by their experiences in Britain's Caribbean colonies. White creoles faced a considerable challenge in showing they were driven by more than a desire for power and profit. Crossing the Line explores the integral role early creole novels played in this cultural labour.

Offers a comprehensive analysis of Edwidge Danticat's exploration of the dialogic relationship between nation and diaspora. NadTHge T. Clitandre argues that Danticat - moving between novels, short stories, and essays - articulates a diasporic consciousness that acts as a social, political, and cultural transformation at the local and global level.

Gossip - long derided and dismissed by writers and intellectuals - is far from frivolous. In Idle Talk, Deadly Talk, Ana Rodriguez Navas reveals gossip to be an urgent, utilitarian, and deeply political practice - a means of staging the narrative tensions, and waging the narrative battles, that mark Caribbean politics and culture.

The first essay collection to consider the Caribbean's relationship to Jewishness through a literary lens. Although Caribbean novelists and poets regularly incorporate Jewish motifs in their work, scholars have neglected this strain in studies of Caribbean literature.

The first essay collection to consider the Caribbean's relationship to Jewishness through a literary lens. Although Caribbean novelists and poets regularly incorporate Jewish motifs in their work, scholars have neglected this strain in studies of Caribbean literature.

In 1979, the Marxist-Leninist New Jewel Movement under Maurice Bishop overthrew the government of the Caribbean island country of Grenada, establishing the People's Revolutionary Government. Laurie Lambert offers the first comprehensive study of how gender and sexuality produced different narratives of the Grenada Revolution.

Examines Langston Hughes's associations with a number of black writers from the Caribbean and Africa, exploring the implications of recognising these multiple facets of the African American literary icon and of taking a truly transnational approach to his life, work, and influence.

Considers how certain literary texts confront the dominant and, at times, exaggerated anti-Haitian Dominican ideology. Megan Jeanette Myers examines the antagonistic portrayal of the two nations, endeavouring to reposition Haiti on the literary map of the Dominican Republic and beyond.

Looks at how fiction from the American tropics written since 1950 engages with the promise of El Dorado in the age of the Anthropocene. Just as the golden kingdom was never found, natural resource extraction has not produced wealth and happiness for the peoples of the tropics.

Combining research, political philosophy, and intellectual history, this book explores the invention of universal emancipation - both in the context of the Age of Enlightenment and in relation to certain key figures and trends in contemporary political philosophy.