Authors:Anthea M. Morrison Abstract: This submission is a review of the 2008 publication, A Permanent Freedom, by Jamaican author Curdella Forbes. It accords particular attention to the importance of the journey motif in this sequence of stories - which relates the adventures of West Indians primarily migrating to or resident in North America, and addresses issues of identity, familial and national history and individual trauma. The review also highlights Forbes' characteristic gift of exploiting the full continuum of Jamaican language. PubDate: Sun, 07 Jan 2018 16:36:50 PST
Authors:Nirjhar Sarkar Abstract: Traditional critical reading of Walcott’s very early text The Sea at Dauphin has prioritized elements like misanthropy, blasphemy or even “passive nihilism”. My paper attempts to read the play in a more affirmative light, re- assessing how much life portrayed here is worth living, how the narrative offers up a morally worthy life when there is no spiritual salve. It aims to read the locus of the narration at the interface of life and “un-life” (to describe in Empedocles’ phrase). Despite recognizing contingency and pain the play interprets a mode of being that affirms values like will, strength, endurance. It exemplifies a strong life, against the type of life espoused by Christianity. Its principal character Afa, a veteran fisherman impresses as a complex study, a mixture of opposites, terrible yet shining. The narrative seeks to affirm fishing community’s negotiation with pain, suffering as a distinctive ethical imperative in overcoming chaos and confusion surrounding their lives. It confirms, as Nietzsche saw it, tragedy as affirmation rather than resignation. And here the gritty sailors of Dauphin leave a testimonial of ‘true optimism’ what Satre believed begins in ‘despair’. PubDate: Sun, 07 Jan 2018 16:36:42 PST
Authors:Joelle Milholm Abstract: So much of postcolonial literature is about creating and revealing identities of places that were once conquered and branded to mimic their conquerors. This essay takes a unique look at just such a quest in Derek Walcott’s Omeros, as it explores the connection between Greek mythology and forming a postcolonial identity in St. Lucia. In this essay, I argue that Walcott blends native culture and classic myth, focused around the abundant use of the word “foam,” which appears forty-two times in the text. Foam’s etiology in Greek mythology is explained as the semen flowing from the castrated genitals of Ouranos, which then mixed with the ocean to give birth to Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Revealing his own Western education and appreciation of Greek mythology, which is shared by St. Lucia’s history due to French and British influence, Walcott uses foam in many ways to represent not only the birth of Aphrodite, but also the birth of a new island identity, in order to help St. Lucia discover and create its own past. This results in the island and the people on it being able to have a secure sense of self in the present and future. Through metafictional narration techniques, allusions to Greek mythology, especially Homer, and Achille’s time traveling exploration of his roots and culture, as well as the acceptance of his own past, Walcott paves the way for reconciliation with the island’s turbulent and complicated past in creating his own Homer-like poetic myth that can become a foundational part of St. Lucia’s postcolonial identity. PubDate: Sun, 07 Jan 2018 16:36:38 PST
Authors:Kim Evelyn Abstract: When George Lamming says that “most West Indians of [his] generation were born in England,” he refers to the process of diasporic identity formation that took place as West Indian migrants relocated to Britain and bonded as a community through oral culture, particularly “the kind of banter which goes between islander and islander,” discovering their commonalities and privileging them over individual island identities, what I term dialogic diaspora formation. This paper presents a close reading of the train scene in Lamming’s The Emigrants as a transitional poem and illustration of dialogic diaspora formation. Characters in The Emigrants start this diaspora building on-ship in the first half of the novel and their community formation is reflected in the narrative technique that Lamming uses: a collective and ambiguous sense of narrator and narration, which, elsewhere, he calls “the collective human substance.” The train scene/poem is a moment of transition in the novel, positioned as it is between the port and the city and between sections of prose narrative. In the scene/poem, collective narration morphs into the competing and overlapping first-person voices as the emigrants connect as a diasporic community over their recognition of British brands and over a disappointing tea service. Both the recognition and the disappointment reveal the depth of imperial cultural hegemony, allow the emigrants to bond by critiquing the concept of the “mother country” as a land of milk and honey, and display Lamming’s great wit and ability to critique the colonial experience. PubDate: Sun, 07 Jan 2018 16:36:34 PST
Authors:Jason T. Hendrickson Abstract: This article centralizes Paule Marshall’s own conception of language and voice as vehicles of acculturation and resistance. Drawing from textual analyses of Brown Girls, Brownstones (1959), The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969), her own reflections upon language, and literary scholarship, this article contends that Marshall’s use of language seeks to give voice to the marginalized, pay homage to the “mother poets” who influenced her, and offer a rebuke to a Fanonian “white gaze” in its unapologetic embrace of culture and history. With specific attention to intricacies of Bajan Creole and African American Vernacular English, I show how Marshall preserves the intricate tapestry and potency of black speech as a political instrument. Her embrace of the “beautiful/ugly” offers a framework for understanding the grittiness and grace of the language she employs, a language which reflects the world it describes.This framework can be applied to better understand, for example, the black vernacular’s place (or lack thereof) within political/juridical spaces in the twenty-first century – such as Rachel Jeantel’s testimony in defense of her friend Trayvon Martin –, and digital spaces, such as Black Twitter. I locate her continued relevance in her intentional deployment of language as both resistance and refuge. PubDate: Mon, 19 Jun 2017 14:12:33 PDT
Authors:Shirley D. Toland-Dix Abstract: Paule Marshall Reimagining Caliban and Prospero in The Chosen Place, The Timeless PeopleThroughout her decades long career as a writer, Bajan-American novelist Paule Marshall has consistently defined herself as a novelist of the African diaspora, explaining that her “way of seeing the world” has been “profoundly shaped by her dual experiences” as both West Indian and African American. A recurring purpose of her work has been developing diasporic consciousness, creating awareness of and representing the connections between peoples of African descent. Her second novel -- The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969) – is profoundly influenced by the late 1960s/early 1970s era when radical black nationalism was most influential in the United States and the Anglophone Caribbean. Set in contemporary time and in actual and symbolic Caribbean space, Chosen Place is her epic of the black Atlantic for she depicts the imaginary postcolonial Caribbean nation of Bourne Island within the larger geographical and historical frame of the Atlantic slave trade and its legacy. Marshall links the literary traditions of African American and Caribbean literature in a work that is more like novels by George Lamming and other Caribbean nationalist novelists of the era than African American novels of a period when the Black Arts Movement was at its height.From the start of her writing career in the 1950’s, Marshall has been unabashedly feminist. Continuing a tradition of black feminist critique of white women’s imperialism, Marshall very deliberately uses women characters to explore the dynamics of the colonizer/colonized relationship, explaining in a 1979 interview with Alexis DeVeaux that Merle Kinbona and Harriet Shippen are meant to “embody the whole power struggle of the world.” Influenced by George Lamming’s brilliant appropriation of the characters Prospero and Caliban from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Marshall audaciously engenders the Prospero/Caliban trope, first in her portrayal of the relationship between Merle and the wealthy English white woman who had “kept” her while she was a student in England. She uses the trope most powerfully, however, in her depiction of the relationship between Harriet Shippen, Anglo-American heir to a fortune amassed through investments in the slave trade, and Merle Kinbona, African-Caribbean descendant of a white plantation owner and an enslaved woman.In doing so, Marshall precedes the explosion of essays by black feminist critics questioning exclusions in feminist theory and racism in the feminist movement. In evoking this relationship, she also precedes by more than a decade critical writing by Caribbean and African American feminist theorists who explicitly challenge the absence of black women in The Tempest by defining themselves as heirs of Sycorax and “daughters of Caliban.” In The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, Marshall uses two masterfully realized women characters to powerfully render the continuing impact of the history of colonialism and enslavement on contemporary relationships. With her gendered rendering of the Prospero and Caliban relationship, she depicts the ways white supremacist beliefs have historically and continue to contaminate the ideal of sisterhood between women. PubDate: Mon, 19 Jun 2017 14:12:30 PDT
Authors:Petal Samuel Abstract: In this article, I highlight the sonic disciplinary regimes that form the backdrop of Paule Marshall’s The Fisher King. Marshall’s final novel chronicles the climax of a generations-long antagonism within a black diasporic family that coalesces around one character’s, Sonny-Rett’s, career as a jazz musician. Sonny-Rett’s exceptional musical talent renders him the target of overlapping regimes of domestic and state regulation and discipline. His alienation from his communities follows the condemnation of jazz in the interwar period as too obscene, flagrant, and undisciplined to have a place in national culture in both the United States and France. By examining the inter- and intra-community fissures that form around the maintenance of a respectable soundscape—and thereby obedient and respectable black subjects—I argue that Marshall calls attention to the soundscape as a critical frontier in struggles to dismantle global anti-blackness. By casting black cultural production as improper and anti-national, black subjects are obliquely targeted for exclusion or extermination under the guise of seemingly neutral regulations that indict music and musical venues rather than subjects.This work underlines Marshall as a forerunner of later Caribbean women writers—such as Erna Brodber and M. NourbeSe Philip—who view decolonization and struggles against anti-blackness as projects that require broad, international black solidarity, rather than solely national or regional affiliation. Sonny Rett’s expulsion from his home, exile from his nation, and death as an expatriate in Paris at the hands of the police signal the pressures of national belonging; conversely, his live performances elicit aural experiences of solidarity with his audience. For Marshall, jazz both links and divides Afro-diasporic communities who grapple with the often-conflicting demands of black middle class respectability and liberatory possibilities of black solidarity.“The Profane Ear” unfolds in three parts: First, I examine how Sonny-Rett is presented as a unique aural subject whose powers of hearing are viewed as both profound and “profane”. Next, through close attention to Sonny Rett’s mother’s home, I show how domestic spaces in the novel become sites of alienation and sonic regulation whose tactics of discipline borrow from military and legal discourses, linking them with the state. Finally, by showing how the linked geographies of New York and Paris in the interwar period enforced similar laws to restrict black jazz musicians, I present Sonny-Rett’s decline and death as exemplary of the link between global anti-blackness and soundscape regulation. PubDate: Mon, 19 Jun 2017 14:12:26 PDT
Authors:Patricia G. Lespinasse Abstract: Paule Marshall’s jazz novel, The Fisher King, weaves an intricate tale about women and jazz in the late nineteen forties and early fifties. From the novel’s description on the inside flap of the book to the reviews and scholarship that attempt to unearth it’s meaning, the narrative has been predominantly read as a patrilineal text. This article proposes a matrilineal reading that focuses on the women who populate the narrative and serve as the archival bodies that “pass on” the legacy of jazz and ultimately free the music from its structural bondage through language and image. This article attends to the way that Marshall challenges and revises major tropes and concerns of jazz literature in The Fisher King. Drawing on cultural criticism and feminist theories, three motifs in Marshall’s jazz novel —wild women, the jazz moment of improvisation, and call and response demonstrate how Marshall uses jazz’s essential elements of improvisation and freedom to reconstruct traditional notions of the female body through rhetorical dialogue and moments of improvisation. I argue that Marshall creates a space (literally and figuratively) for black female agency and challenges the male-dominated narratives about jazz music in America and abroad. I contend that Marshall constructs varied images of black women as improvisers/innovators/creators in order to place women at the center, rather than on the periphery, of jazz literary discourse. Ultimately, The Fisher King becomes a prime example of Marshall’s uncanny ability to (re)inscribe the interconnections between black women, jazz music, and African Diaspora literature. PubDate: Mon, 19 Jun 2017 14:12:22 PDT
Authors:Janelle Rodriques Abstract: Praisesong for the Widow (1984) tells the story of African-American Avey Johnson’s arrival in Grenada, having abandoned an opulent Caribbean cruise, and her sudden encounter with the local “excursion” on nearby Carriacou. Having experienced physical and psychological unease even before this trip she finds that, in attempting to return “home” to her comfortable life in New York, she discovers a new home, that within the transatlantic African diaspora. Ostensibly, Praisesong is a story of a woman past middle age “rediscovering herself” against the backdrop of an exotic Caribbean tourist imaginary, but Avey comes to an understanding not only of herself but of the people around her, both in present-day Carriacou and in the memories of her childhood and earlier adult life. Her past, present and future converge on her at once and, through the ritual dance that forms the novel’s climax, Marshall portrays Avey’s, and by extension all diasporic peoples’ spiritual healing, and the reclamation of our cultural and historic identity from the debilitating effects of slavery, colonialism and “Western” materialism. Avey represents the diasporic subject who must be reunited with a culture she has trained herself to deny, and this culture is not limited by geography.I will be reading this novel through an Afrofuturistic lens, given its recovery of “the histories of counter-futures created in a century hostile to Afrodiasporic projection.”[1] Praisesong is a figurative reconnection of an imagined past with a destabilised present, and a re-engagement with representations of blackness, Caribbeanness, and Africanness that transcend linguistic and spatial boundaries. The counterhistory that Marshall presents allows for an imagining of an integrated black diaspora, one that exists outside of strict geopolitical chronology.Avey rediscovers herself and her people(s) chiefly through the figure of Lebert Joseph, her unofficial tour guide to the excursion. Joseph, however, is a manifestation of Papa Legba/Eshu Elegbara, the trickster deity of Yoruba/Fon mythology who is at once guardian of knowledge, speaker of all languages, and gatekeeper between this world and the next. Avey, who has been cut off from ancestral knowledge, can only come back to herself and her origins through the ancestors – who communicate, in turn, through him. This reconnection is cosmological as well as cultural, and through my exploration of the characterisation of Lebert Joseph I will argue that Marshall uses African mythology – which she turns into Caribbean cosmology – to envision a black future identity that is not “American,” not “Caribbean,” not strictly “African,” but one that belongs to black people from all of these “nations,” and from which we can all build a trans-temporal, transnational future.[1] Kelly Baker Josephs, ‘Beyond Geography, Past Time: Afrofuturism, The Rainmaker’s Mistake, and Caribbean Studies,’ Small Axe 17, 2013, pp.123-135 (p.126). PubDate: Mon, 19 Jun 2017 14:12:18 PDT
Authors:Marlene Clark Abstract: In addition to personal, national, and/or global anxieties, Paule Marshall’s novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones speaks most eloquently of local anxieties experienced throughout the twentieth century and even to this day in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. This essay argues that Marshall’s novel provides a rare glimpse into the invention, development, and repeated transformation of this important neighborhood in Black history. Not often read as a novel of material conditions, Brown Girl, Brownstones contains the story of a neighborhood that serves as a space of representation for an ever-evolving population, each with its own socio-cultural baggage. We see through Marshall’s eye, and that of her female protagonists Silla and Selina Boyce, the last vestiges of the first rendition of Bedford Stuyvesant as a space of representation marking the social, political and economic dominance of the affluent Irish first inhabiting the ornate brownstones that line the newly gridded streets of former farmland, protected by the firewall of restricted covenants that by 1939 come tumbling down. We experience through Silla and Selina Boyce one of the first examples of “white flight,” as the neighborhood transforms into a space representing aspirational Barbadians, who, despite New Deal “redlining,” band together to form their own Garveyite financial associations, allowing them to “buy house” and turn the brownstones of Bedford Stuyvesant into sites of entrepreneurial profit through the creation of Single Room Occupancy hotels, which in yet another turn contributes to profound disinvestment and the building of massive post-War housing “projects” for the poor on bulldozed blocks. Virtually 100% Black during the second half of the twentieth century, Bedford Stuyvesant becomes one of New York’s most prevalent representations of the “ghetto”—rife with crime, abandoned buildings, shuttered businesses, and poor schools—despite the best efforts of committed residents and community activists. And finally, we witness the recent undoing of Silla and her compatriots’ SROs by white gentrifiers, corporations, and hedge funds, who spend great sums to return these brownstones to single or two-family status, and even greater sums on gut renovations, reaping in the process massive profits, and returning Bedford Stuyvesant to a space representing once again the social, political, and economic dominance of whiteness. PubDate: Mon, 19 Jun 2017 14:12:14 PDT
Authors:Justin Haynes Abstract: Ghosts in the Posthuman Machine: Prostheses and Performance in the Chosen Place, the Timeless PeopleWhen scholars consider performances within Paule Marshall’s The Chosen Place, the Timeless People, they tend to subscribe to its easy execution—either the revelers in town or the Bournehills residents who reenact Cuffee Ned’s uprising. In thinking about Marshall’s text from a posthuman perspective, in which I consider the posthuman to be the joining, and interaction, of a human and an intelligent machine, I posit that the performance that warrants greater scrutiny in a twenty-first century environment, in which humans gravitate toward the posthuman condition, is Vere’s racing of a USAmerican car upon his return from the U.S. plantation labor scheme. During the race the Opel’s performance eventually gains it a kind of sentience that outstrips Vere’s and enables both of their destruction.This kind of destructive performance is seen in another machine in the novel, the cane rollers that extract the juice from the sugar cane plants on the island. The difference between the cane rollers and the Opel lies in their types of performance: while the cane rollers’ actions are repetitive, the Opel’s performance relies on reenactment. Both, however, are extensions of the colonial mission, and both result in the subjugation of the descendants of Bournehills’ slaves. For these descendants effective resistance comes in the form of the reenactment of Cuffee Ned’s uprising through their carnival performance. This mode of reenactment is limited, however, to the period of time in which the carnival operates.Another mode of resistance to the destructive impulse of the machines lies in the deployment of Caribbean folklore characters and their characteristics that tend to feature enhanced modes of mobility. Because the descendants of the sugar cane estates still rely on the cane rollers in order to extract their cane, this also becomes a limited mode of reenactment. The only true way to usurp the colonial authority of either machine is for the descendants to develop, like Merle, a vibrant mode of mobility that allows them to escape the machines’ valence by leaving the island. For most of the descendants, however, this proves difficult, and it results in a cycle of dependence underscored by high rates of character mortality in the novel. PubDate: Mon, 19 Jun 2017 14:12:10 PDT
Authors:Lia T. Bascomb Abstract: Reading Paule Marshall’s 2009 memoir Triangular Road as a biomythography illumines the ways in which the African diaspora is imagined in and through personal and collective narrative. African diaspora studies has sought to map the historical moments, cultural practices, political considerations, and geographical and conceptual spaces that constitute the African diaspora. This article explores how biomythography can possibly map African diaspora discourse beyond the temporal and the spatial. Triangular Road connects diasporic movement and misunderstanding. It uses the concept of bodies of water to map Marshall’s life path. It crosses the lines of official nation-state representations, social gatherings, and international cultural exchange. As biomythography it uses the memoir form to both refute the singularity of an autobiography, rooting Marshall’s story in the communities she has moved through and existed within, and meld the realities of what she can know of those communities with the fantasies she produces in place of absent histories. Marshall’s text crosses generations of literary artistry, nation-building, and diasporic longing. In conversation with other Caribbean women’s biomythographies such as Audre Lorde’s Zami, Triangular Road helps us to navigate the intentionally fuzzy lines between fiction and history, between the personal and the communal, between the rootedness of lands we know and the fluid possibilities of the waters that both separate and join them. PubDate: Mon, 19 Jun 2017 14:12:07 PDT
Authors:Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken Abstract: Régine Michelle Jean-Charles’s Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary (2014) is a stunning first book by a dynamic scholar working at the intersection of Africana Studies, Human Rights Studies, and Feminist Studies, not to mention literary studies in French. Jean-Charles’s title “Conflict Bodies” gestures both to the context of "conflict zones" as identified by human rights institutions, and it also refers to how the body of the victim-survivor is at once one that has survived, but whose survival reinscribes the body with new subjectivities, subjectivities that are informed both by the extremely intimate, and by the vastly globalized. In other words, as the fictions, photo essays, memoirs, and cinema analyzed by Jean-Charles demonstrate, rape is not just more visible in the conflict zone, it is literally used as a weapon of war, wars that are officially recognized as such, and wars that take place under the auspices of "peacekeeping" missions. That is, the raped body is one that has recorded a specific “script of violence” (9), which has been generated not by any one perpetrator, but by “the epistemic violence of colonialism and postcolonialism” (Ibid.). PubDate: Thu, 22 Dec 2016 12:16:48 PST
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