Caribbean Jewish Crossings : Literary History and Creative Practice

Description

Caribbean Jewish Crossings is the first essay collection to consider the Caribbean's relationship to Jewishness through a literary lens. Although Caribbean novelists and poets regularly incorporate Jewish motifs in their work, scholars have neglected this strain in studies of Caribbean literature.The book takes a pan-Caribbean approach, with chapters addressing the Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanophone, and Dutch-speaking Caribbean. Part 1 traces the emergence of a Caribbean-Jewish literary culture in Suriname, St. Thomas, Jamaica, and Cuba from the late eighteenth century through the early twentieth century. Part 2 brings into focus Sephardic and crypto-Jewish motifs in contemporary Caribbean literature, while Part 3 turns to the question of colonialism and its relationship to Holocaust memory. The volume concludes with the compelling voices of contemporary Caribbean creative writers. Cover Page Title Page Copyright Page Contents Foreword Acknowledgments Introduction: Crossing Disciplines, Cultures, Geographies Part I. The Emergence of Caribbean Jewish Literary Culture The Portuguese Jewish Nation: An Enlightenment Essay on the Colony of Suriname Henrik Hertz and Racial Imagination in the Nineteenth-Century Danish Caribbean Jamaican Jewish Tricksters: Philip Cohen Labatt’s Literary Crossings Translating Cuba: Language, Race, and Homeland in Cuban-Yiddish Poetry of the 1930s Part II. Revisiting the Inquisition and the Sephardic Caribbean David Dabydeen’s Hogarth: Blacks, Jews, and Postcolonial Ekphrasis Jubanidad and the Literary Transmission of Cuban Crypto-Judaism Diaspora and Hybridity: Jewish American Women Write the Caribbean Part III. Colonialism and Caribbean Holocaust Memory Splattering the Object: Césaire, Nazi Racism, and the Colonial From Shtetl to Settler Colony and Back: André Schwarz-Bart’s The Morning Star Raphaël Confiant and Jewishness: The Fraught Landscapes of French, Martinican, and Franco-Martinica Intellectualisms Caryl Phillips’s Post-Holocaust/Decolonized Interstices and the Levinasian Subjective in Higher Ground and The Nature of Blood Part IV. Contemporary Voices: Narrative and Poetry Ema Meeting with Judith Jewish-Cuban Poems On The Nature of Blood and the Ghost of Anne Frank Afterword Contributors Index Recent books in the series