How about learning more about Caribbean societies, cultures and arts in the new year?
Caribeart offers you a selection of interesting readings and browsing through which you will go to meet visions, artists and stories. Something to rest your mind, to deconstruct gently, to stimulate your curiosity and to develop your critical mind.
Suzanne Césaire, literary and artistic archaeology of an impeded memory – Anny Domnique Curtius
In this French translation of Anny-Domnique Curtius’s work, Suzanne Roussi Césaire is the focus. It is a question of understanding more deeply her texts and themes, as well as her role as a black woman in the Négritude movement. Through the significant events of her personal life, the author also attempts to explain why today there is so little information about her and her contribution to French Caribbean literature.
Nature’s Wild : Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean – Andil Gosine
In Nature’s Wild, Andil Gosine addresses issues of humanism, queer theory, and animality in order to examine and revise the understanding of queer desire in the Caribbean. By examining colonial law, visual arts practices, and contemporary activism, Gosine shows how the very concept of queerness in the Caribbean (and more broadly in the Americas) has been overdetermined by a human/animal divide influenced by colonization. He questions how individual and collective anxieties about “wild natures” have shaped Caribbean existence, while calling for a re-evaluation of what political liberation might look like.
What a Noise Against the Cane – Désirée C. Bailey
What Noise Against the Cane is a lyrical quest for belonging and freedom, weaving together political resistance, Caribbean folklore, immigration, and the realities of Black life in America. Desiree C. Bailey begins by reworking the epic into an oceanic narrative of bondage and liberation in the midst of the Haitian Revolution. The poems then turn to the contemporary black diaspora, probing mythologies of home, belief, nation, and womanhood.
Diaries of An Artist – Antonio Figuero
In this first volume of diaries, artist Antonio Figuero takes viewers on a journey through some of his early years of oil painting. He looks at what lies behind the canvas, the stories behind the moments and his memories of life as an oil painter in the Caribbean.
Dominicana – Angie Dacruz
In bright, musical prose that reflects the energy of New York City, Angie Cruz’s Dominicana is a short story, depicting an essential portrait of the Caribbean-American immigration experience, and illustrating the timeless coming-of-age story of a young woman finding her way in the world.
Changemakers : 101 Portraits of men in Jamaica – Peter Ferguson
Perter Ferguson’s respectful but piercing lens takes an intimate look at these 101 men who helped build a country. Sometimes very revealing, sometimes intimidating, these images force us to look through the two-dimensional canvas at our own reality in this three-dimensional world. These informal portraits can make us want to know more about the men Ferguson calls “CHANGEMAKERS” and engage with them to get a glimpse of different personalities, and feel the heartbeat of a nation.
Le dérangeur: A small lexicon in the process of decolonization – Piment
Through this irreverent lexicon, a true survival guide in a so-called post-colonial society, Piment, a collective of four afro-diasporic culture enthusiasts and authors of a cultural program broadcast on Radio Nova, proposes new definitions for words and expressions that are old or modern, necessary or superfluous, political or humorous. Sensitive palates, please refrain!
Being la Dominicana : Race and Identity in the visual Culture in Santo Domingo – Rachel Afi Quinn
Rachel Afi Quinn investigates how visual media portrays Dominican women and how women represent themselves in their own creative efforts in response to existing stereotypes. By looking at the dynamic realities and racialized gendered experiences of women in Santo Domingo, Quinn reveals how racial ambiguity and color hierarchy shape experiences of identity and subjectivity in the Dominican Republic. She fuses contextual analyses and interviews with young Dominican women to offer a rare glimpse into a Caribbean society in which the tourism industry and popular media reward and rely on Dominican women’s ability to transform themselves to interpret gender, race, and class.
Sex, Sea and Self: Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean discourses – Jacqueline Couti
Sex, Sea, and Self reassesses the place of the French West Indies and French Caribbean literature in current postcolonial thought and visions of the Black Atlantic. Using a feminist lens, this study examines neglected twentieth-century French texts by black writers from Martinique and Guadeloupe, making the analysis of some of these texts accessible to English-speaking readers for the first time. This interdisciplinary study of female and male authors reconsiders their political strategies and the critical role of French Creoles in creating their own history. An approach that recalibrates overly simplistic understandings of Caribbean French victimization and alienation.
CLR James’s Caribbean – Paget Henry and Paul Buhle
C. L. R. James (1901-1989) was an internationally renowned thinker, writer and revolutionary activist. Born in Trinidad, he devoted his entire life to understanding and transforming race and class exploitation in his native West Indies, as well as in Britain and the United States. Drawing on James’s observations of his own life, as he revealed them to his interlocutors and close friends, renowned scholars examine in this book James’s childhood and early years as a colonial literary scholar, as well as his important contribution to the political and cultural understanding of the West Indies. Moving beyond previous biographical interpretations, the contributors here address the problem of reading James’s texts in light of poststructuralist criticism, the implications of his texts for Marxist discourse, and the problems of Caribbean development.