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

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