Reimagining the Caribbean: Conversations among the Creole, English, French, and Spanish Caribbean

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This volume brings together scholars working in different languagesCreole, French, English, Spanishand modes of cultural productionliterature, art, film, musicto suggest how best to model courses that impart the rich, vibrant, and multivalent aspects of the Caribbean in the classroom. Essays focus on discussing how best to cross languages, histories, and modes of discourse. Instead of relying on available paradigms that depend on Western ways of thinking, the essays recommend methods to develop a pan-Caribbean perspective in relation to notions of the self, uses of language, gender hierarchies, and ideas of nationhood. Contributors represent various disciplines, work in one of the several languages of the Caribbean, and offer essays that reflect different cadres of expertise.

Reviews

[T]his edited volume offers a comparative analysis of the multifaceted nature of the Caribbean. Though many studies have appeared on the region's literature and culture, this work is unique in its emphasis on teaching the Caribbean to North American students. The contributors, Orlando and Cypess included, examine the problems scholars often face when teaching courses on the Caribbean, and they call for a cross-disciplinary approach, despite the innumerable challenges this entails. They maintain that teaching of the Caribbean must move beyond specific languages, and beyond literary studies, to include other modes of cultural production. Contributors analyze literary works, and other forms of cultural production, from diverse perspectives, including border theory, ecocriticism, and translation studies. The volume stresses the importance of the regions history and its representation in education and the visual arts as well as literature. This volume's pedagogical methodology makes it quite valuable for those involved with teaching courses on the Caribbean. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, and faculty. * CHOICE *
[The essays] provide thought-provoking, plentiful models and suggestions for teachers and students of the Caribbean.The book offers a Caribbean trans-lingual panorama that explores specific national cultures as well as encompassing the areas inter-relatedness. . . .[the authors] provide an extensive sampling of primary and secondary works from the entire area, going beyond the traditional borders of monolingual countries and their national production. . . .Even more valuable are the models of interdisciplinary approaches that the essays offer for teaching the areas complex web of politics, race, class, gender and national identities. * Anthurium *
Valrie Orlando and Sandra Cypess Reimagining the Caribbean: Conversations among the Creole, English, French, and Spanish Caribbean will light up the horizons of students and teachers of Caribbean cultures. The volume offers a panorama that explores the specificities and inter-relatedness of cultural production (literature, film, art, music). Covering fields as diverse as poetics, translation, gender studies, culture theory, and national identities, the authors range beyond the traditional borders of monolingual, Balkanized Caribbean studies. The essays examine the Caribbean within its web of history, politics, economics, and theory as well as the areas globalized interrelations. -- Mara Acosta Cruz, author of Dream Nation: Puerto Rican Culture and the Fictions of Independence
For teachers and scholars of Caribbean literature and culture, Reimagining the Caribbeanis necessary reading and an invaluable guide for navigating this complex terrain of study. Proposing that the Caribbean is best taught through close attention to its linguistic, cultural, and ethnic, not to mention geographical, diversity, this excellent set of essays also shows the importance of understanding the region as a whole. Most welcomed are the authors explorations of practical approaches to analyzing the diverse unity of the Caribbean:hierarchies of language and the stakes of working with translations; the role of canon formation, colonial history, and the literary marketplace; and the importance of interdisciplinarity (film, theater, visual arts, literature) to the field. I applaud editors Cypess and Orlando for helping to define and reshape the field of Caribbean cultural studies and for giving us this rich and deeply needed pedagogical resource. -- Valerie Kaussen, University of Missouri-Columbia

Author Bio

Valrie K. Orlando is professor of French and Francophone literatures in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Maryland. Sandra Messinger Cypess is professor of Latin American literatures in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Maryland.