Books in the New World Studies series

<p><p> <i>Consuming Visions</i> explores the relationship between cinema and writing in early twentieth-century Brazil, focusing on how the new and foreign medium of film was consumed by a literary society in the throes of modernization. Maite Conde places this relationship in the specific context of turn-of-the-century Rio de Janeiro, which underwent a radical transformation to a modern global city, becoming a concrete symbol of the country's broader processes of change and modernization. Analyzing an array of literary texts, from journalistic essays and popular women's novels to anarchist treatises and vaudeville plays, the author shows how the writers' encounters with the cinema were consistent with the significant changes taking place in the city.</p><br><p>The arrival and initial development of the cinema in Brazil were part of the new urban landscape in which early Brazilian movies not only articulated the processes of the city's modernization but also enabled new urban spectatorswomen, immigrants, a new working class, and a recently liberated slave populationto see, believe in, and participate in its future. In the process, these early movies challenged the power of the written word and of Brazilian writers, threatening the hegemonic function of writing that had traditionally forged the contours of the nation's cultural life. An emerging market of consumers of the new cultural phenomenapopular theater, the department store, the factory, illustrated magazinesreflected changes that not only modernized literary production but also altered the very life and everyday urban experiences of the population. <i>Consuming Visions</i> is an ambitious and engaging examination of the ways in which mass culture can become an agent of intellectual and aesthetic transformation.</p></p>

The mambi is the foremost icon of Cuba's past and present. Scrutinizing how this figure has been aesthetically rendered in literature, historiography, cinema, and monuments, Eric Morales-Franceschini teases out the emancipatory promises that the story of Cuba Libre came to embody in the twentieth-century popular imagination.

The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) was the first antislavery and anticolonial uprising led by New World Africans to result in the creation of an independent and slavery-free nation state. This anthology brings together for the first time a transnational and multilingual selection of literature about the revolution.

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.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, the idea of independence inspired radical changes across the French-speaking world. Julie-Francoise Tolliver examines the links that writers from Quebec, the Caribbean, and Africa imagined to unite that world, illuminating the tropes they used to articulate solidarities across the race and class differences.

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.

In coastal Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Miami, Haiti, Martinique, Cancun, and Trinidad and Tobago, the artists and writers featured in Water Graves are an archipelago connected by a history of the slave trade and environmental vulnerability.

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.

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.

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.

Examines seven plays by Ina Cesaire, Maryse Conde, Gerty Dambury, and Simone Schwarz-Bart that premiered in the French Caribbean or in France in the 1980s and 1990s and soon thereafter travelled to the United States. Emily Sahakian argues that these late-twentieth-century plays by French Caribbean women writers dramatize and enact creolization.

Explores the changing place of Latin America in US culture from the mid-nineteenth century to the recent US-Cuba detente. In doing so, it uncovers the complex ways in which Americans have imagined the global geography of poverty and progress, as the hemispheric imperialism of the nineteenth century yielded to the Cold War discourse of "underdevelopment".

Examines the post-Revolutionary creative endeavors of Afro-Cuban women. Taking on the question of how African diaspora cultures practice remembrance, this book reveals the ways in which these artists restage the confrontations between modernity and tradition. It shows how their accomplishments were silenced in official Cuban history and culture.

Arguing that the aesthetic practices of 20th-century French Caribbean writers reconstruct an historical awareness once lost amid colonial exploitation, Nesbitt shows how these writers use the critical force of the aesthetic imagination to transform the parameters of the Antillean experience.

Staging a dialogue between Maryse Conde's novels and the field of postcolonial studies, this work argues that Conde enacts a strategy of ""critical incorporations"" in her fiction, imitating and transforming many of the prevailing narratives of postcolonial theory so as to explore their theoretical and conceptual limits.

The Afrocubanismo was an artistic and intellectual movement in Cuba in the 1920s and 1930s that tried to convey a national and racial identity through poetry. This book treats the poetry of this movement, and questions the assumption that the poetry did manage to symbolize racial reconciliation and unification.

Examines the novels of four Caribbean women writers who have radically reformulated the meanings of the national, geographical, sexual, and racial concepts through which postcolonial studies represents difference. This book represents a phase in postcolonial studies that calls for a fundamental rethinking of the terminology and assumptions.

Pollard looks to recent Caribbean poetry as a means of reassessing modernism's cosmopolitanism; in particular, his book redefines the cosmopolitan influence of T. S. Eliot's modernism by examining how his ideas have been transformed by the two leading Anglophone Caribbean poets, Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite.

Arguing that race has been the specter that has haunted many of the discussions about Latin American regional and national cultures today, Anke Birkenmaier shows how theories of race and culture in Latin America evolved dramatically in the period between the two world wars. In response to the rise of scientific racism in Europe and the American hemisphere in the early twentieth century, anthropologists joined numerous writers and artists in founding institutions, journals, and museums that actively pushed for an antiracist science of culture, questioning pseudoscientific theories of race and moving toward more broadly conceived notions of ethnicity and culture.Birkenmaier surveys the work of key figures such as Cuban historian and anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, Haitian scholar and novelist Jacques Roumain, French anthropologist and museum director Paul Rivet, and Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, focusing on the transnational networks of scholars in France, Spain, and the United States to which they were connected. Reviewing their essays, scientific publications, dictionaries, novels, poetry, and visual arts, the author traces the cultural study of Latin America back to these interdisciplinary discussions about the meaning of race and culture in Latin America, discussions that continue to provoke us today.

Focusing on the literary representation of performance practices in anglophone, francophone, and hispanophone Caribbean literature, Jeannine Murray-Romn shows how a shared regional aesthetic emerges from the descriptions of music, dance, and oral storytelling events. Because the historical circumstances that led to the development of performance traditions supersede the geopolitical and linguistic divisions of colonialism, the literary uses of these traditions resonate across the linguistic boundaries of the region. The author thus identifies the aesthetic that emerges from the act of writing about live arts and moving bodies as a practice that is grounded in the historically, geographically, and culturally specific features of the Caribbean itself. Working with twentieth- and twenty-first-century sources ranging from theatrical works and novels to blogs, Murray-Romn examines the ways in which writers such as Jacques Stephen Alexis, Zo Valds, Rosario Ferr, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Marlon James experiment with textually compensating for the loss of the corporeality of live relationship in performance traditions. Through their exploration of the interaction of literature and performance, she argues, Caribbean writers themselves offer a mode of bridging the disjunction between cultural and philosophical approaches within Caribbean studies.

In Market Aesthetics, Elena Machado Saez explores the popularity of Caribbean diasporic writing within an interdisciplinary, comparative, and pan-ethnic framework. She contests established readings of authors such as Junot Daz, Julia Alvarez, Edwidge Danticat, and Robert Antoni while showcasing the work of emerging writers such as David Chariandy, Marlon James, and Monique Roffey. By reading these writers as part of a transnational literary trend rather than within isolated national ethnic traditions, the author is able to show how this fiction adopts market aesthetics to engage the mixed blessings of multiculturalism and globalization via the themes of gender and sexuality.New World StudiesModern Language Initiative

A leader in the social movement that achieved Trinidad and Tobago's independence from Britain in 1962, Eric Williams (1911-1981) served as its first prime minister. Although much has been written about Williams as a historian and a politician, Maurice St. Pierre is the first to offer a full-length treatment of him as an intellectual. St. Pierre focuses on Williams's role not only in challenging the colonial exploitation of Trinbagonians but also in seeking to educate and mobilize them in an effort to generate a collective identity in the struggle for independence. Drawing on extensive archival research and using a conflated theoretical framework, the author offers a portrait of Williams that shows how his experiences in Trinidad, England, and America radicalized him and how his relationships with other Caribbean intellectuals-along with Aim Csaire in Martinique, Juan Bosch in the Dominican Republic, George Lamming of Barbados, and Frantz Fanon from Martinique-enabled him to seize opportunities for social change and make a significant contribution to Caribbean epistemology.