Ash-Caribbean Literary Aesthetic in the Cuban, Colombian, Costa Rican, and Panamanian Novel of Resistance

(Hardback)

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Ash-Caribbean Literary Aesthetics in the Cuban, Colombian, Costa Rican, and Panamanian Novel of Resistance contributes to understanding the important role that African-influenced spiritual

cultures play in literature that challenges the concept that European aesthetics are superior to African-inspired cultures. Thomas W. Edison highlights the novels of four courageous Caribbean writers who have used their novels to integrate aspects of African ontology with literary techniques, themes, and history. The common element in these works is the inclusion of African-inspired faith traditions and culture. As a result of this perspective, their literature stands out as keen examples of Ash-Caribbean resistance literature. While each writer presents their unique literary style in the works, collectively they draw on a foundation of the Afro-Caribbean. The Circum-Caribbean region will be the geographical unit because of its collective history of slavery, colonial rule, and parallel patterns of religious syncretism. This book makes an important literary connection among Caribbean Hispanophone nations.

Reviews

Edison honors the ancestors, academic and spiritual. His idea of ash aesthetics combines Yoruba- and Bantu-derived concepts of faith, death, time, music, and language with a literary and critical dialogue that spans Carpentier and the pioneers of US Afro-Hispanism to today's critical rediscovery of Zapata, showing that the African diaspora unites diverse generations, nations, and communities.

In this book, Thomas W. Edison argues convincingly in support of the importance of the philosophical concept of Ashe' to the worldviews of the selected Cuban and Afro-Hispanic authors. Ashe', in this context, underscores the resistance to the oppression and dehumanization of black peoples and is an integral component of the cultural maroonage that has sustained them throughout the African Diaspora. Ash-Caribbean Literary Aesthetic in the Cuban, Colombian, Costa Rican, and Panamanian Novel of Resistance is original, thoroughly researched, meticulously documented, and represents an excellent example of literary intertextually in critical practice.

Author Bio

Thomas Wayne Edison is associate professor of Spanish in the Department of Classical and Modern Languages at the University of Louisville.