Reimagining the Caribbean

Valérie 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 area’s globalized interrelations. -- María 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 Caribbean is 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
[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 area’s 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 area’s complex web of politics, race, class, gender and national identities. * Anthurium *