Creole Indigeneity: Between Myth and Nation in the Caribbean

During the colonial period in Guyana, the country's coastal lands were worked by enslaved Africans and indentured Indians. In Creole Indigeneity, Shona N. Jackson investigates how their descendants, collectively called Creoles, have remade themselves as Guyana's new natives, displacing indigenous peoples in the Caribbean through an extension of colonial attitudes and policies. Looking particularly at the nation's politically fraught decades from the 1950s to the present, Jackson explores aboriginal and Creole identities in Guyanese society. Through government documents, interviews, and political speeches, she reveals how Creoles, though unable to usurp the place of aboriginals as First Peoples in the New World, nonetheless managed to introduce a new, more socially viable definition of belonging, through labor. The very reason for bringing enslaved and indentured workers into Caribbean labor became the organizing principle for Creoles' new identities. Creoles linked true belonging, and so political and material right, to having performed modern labor on the land; labor thus became the basis for their subaltern, settler modes of indigeneity-a contradiction for belonging under postcoloniality that Jackson terms Creole indigeneity. In doing so, her work establishes a new and productive way of understanding the relationship between national power and identity in colonial, postcolonial, and anticolonial contexts.

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https://magrudy.com/book/creole-indigeneity-between-myth-and-nation-in-the-caribbean-9780816677757/

60.29 USD

The Tropics Bite Back: Culinary Coups in Caribbean Literature

The ubiquitous presence of food and hunger in Caribbean writing-from folktales, fiction, and poetry to political and historical treatises-signals the traumas that have marked the Caribbean from the Middle Passage to the present day. The Tropics Bite Back traces the evolution of the Caribbean response to the colonial gaze (or rather the colonial mouth) from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first. Unlike previous scholars, Valerie Loichot does not read food simply as a cultural trope. Instead, she is interested in literary cannibalism, which she interprets in parallel with theories of relation and creolization. For Loichot, the culinary is an abstract mode of resistance and cultural production. The Francophone and Anglophone authors whose works she interrogates-including Patrick Chamoiseau, Suzanne Cesaire, Aime Cesaire, Maryse Conde, Edwidge Danticat, Edouard Glissant, Lafcadio Hearn, and Dany Laferriere- bite back at the controlling images of the cannibal, the starved and starving, the cunning cook, and the sexualized octoroon with the ultimate goal of constructing humanity through structural, literal, or allegorical acts of ingesting, cooking, and eating. The Tropics Bite Back employs cross-disciplinary methods to rethink notions of race and literary influence by providing a fresh perspective on forms of consumption both metaphorical and material.

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https://magrudy.com/book/the-tropics-bite-back-culinary-coups-in-caribbean-literature-9780816679836/

60.29 USD

The Inner Life of Mestizo Nationalism

The only recent English-language work on Spanish-American indigenismo from a literary perspective, Estelle Tarica's work shows how modern Mexican and Andean discourses about the relationship between Indians and non-Indians create a unique literary aesthetic that is instrumental in defining the experience of mestizo nationalism. Engaging with narratives by Jesus Lara, Jose Maria Arguedas, and Rosario Castellanos, among other thinkers, Tarica explores the rhetorical and ideological aspects of interethnic affinity and connection. In her examination, she demonstrates that these connections posed a challenge to existing racial hierarchies in Spanish America by celebrating a new kind of national self at the same time that they contributed to new forms of subjection and discrimination. Going beyond debates about the relative merits of indigenismo and mestizaje, Tarica puts forward a new perspective on indigenista literature and modern mestizo identities by revealing how these ideologies are symptomatic of the dilemmas of national subject formation. The Inner Life of Mestizo Nationalism offers insight into the contemporary resurgence and importance of indigenista discourses in Latin America. Estelle Tarica is associate professor of Latin American literature and culture at the University of California, Berkeley.

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https://magrudy.com/book/inner-life-of-mestizo-nationalism-9780816650040/

54.35 USD

Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America's Export Age

Between 1870 and 1930, Latin American countries were incorporated into global capitalist networks like never before, mainly as exporters of raw materials and importers of manufactured goods. During this Export Age, entire regions were given over to the cultivation of export commodities such as coffee and bananas, capital and labor were relocated to new production centers, and barriers to foreign investment were removed. Capital Fictions investigates the key role played by literature in imagining and interpreting the rapid transformations unleashed by Latin America's first major wave of capitalist modernization. Using an innovative blend of literary and economic analysis and drawing from a rich interdisciplinary archive, Ericka Beckman provides the first extended evaluation of Export Age literary production. She traces the emergence of a distinct set of fictions, fantasies, and illusions that accompanied the rise of export-led, dependent capitalism. These capital fictions range from promotional pamphlets for Guatemalan coffee and advertisements for French fashions, to novels about stock market collapse in Argentina and rubber extraction in the Amazon. Beckman explores how Export Age literature anticipated some of the key contradictions faced by contemporary capitalist societies, including extreme financial volatility, vast social inequality, and ever-more-intense means of exploitation. Questioning the opposition between culture and economics in Latin America and elsewhere, Capital Fictions shows that literature operated as a powerful form of political economy during this period.

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https://magrudy.com/book/capital-fictions-the-literature-of-latin-americas-export-age-9780816679195/

60.29 USD

The Impure Imagination: Toward A Critical Hybridity In Latin American Writing

Hybridity is a term that has been applied to Latin American politics, literature, and intellectual life for more than a century. During the past two decades, it has figured in-and been transfigured by-the work of prominent postcolonialist writers and thinkers throughout the Americas. In this pathbreaking work, Joshua Lund offers a thoughtful critique of hybridity by reading contemporary theories of cultural mixing against their historical precursors. The Impure Imagination is the first book to systematically analyze today's dominant theories in relation to earlier, narrative manifestations of hybridity in Latin American writing, with a particular focus on Mexico and Brazil. Generally understood as the impurification of standard or canonized forms, hybridity has historically been embraced as a basic marker of Latin American regional identity and as a strategy of resistance to cultural imperialism. Lund contends that Latin American theories and narratives of hybridity have been, and continue to be, underwritten by a structure of colonial power. Here he provides an informed critique and cogent investigation of this connection, its cultural effects, and its political implications. Using the emergence of hybridity as an analytical frame for thinking about culture in the Americas, Lund examines the contributions of influential thinkers, including Nestor Garcia Canclini, Homi Bhabha, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Jorge Luis Borges, Antonio Candido, and many others. Distinguished by its philosophical grounding and underpinned with case studies, The Impure Imagination employs postcolonial theory and theories of race as it explores Latin American history and culture. The result is an original and interrogative study of hybridity that exposes surprising-and unsettling-similarities with nationalistic discourses. Joshua Lund is assistant professor of Spanish at the University of Pittsburgh. His essays have appeared in A Contracorriente, Race & Class, Cultural Critique, and the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies.

https://magrudy.com/book/the-impure-imagination-toward-a-critical-hybridity-in-latin-american-writing-9780816647859/

48.44 USD