Memory and the Archival Turn in Caribbean Literature and Culture

Description

This book discusses an archival turn in the work of contemporary Caribbean writers and visual artists across linguistic locations and whose work engages critically with various historical narratives and colonial and postcolonial records. This refiguration opens a critical space and retells stories and histories previously occluded in/by those records, and in spaces of the public sphere. Through poetics and aesthetics of fragmentation largely influenced by music and popular culture, their work encourages contrapuntal ways of (re)thinking histories; ways that interrogate the influence of colonial narratives in processes of silencing but also centre the knowledge found in oral histories and other forms of artistic archives outside official repositories. Discussing literature and selected artwork by artists from Britain, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and Trinidad and Tobago, Memory and the Archival Turn in Caribbean Literature and Culture demonstrates the historiographical significance of artistic and cultural production. Acknowledgements Contents List of Figures 1 Introduction. Counter-Narratives of History and Relational Fragmentation The Archival Turn: Imagining Possibilities Beyond the (Post)colonial Record Fragmentation and Aesthetics Memory and Music: Contrapuntal Matters Chapter Overview Critical Articulations of Historical Memory 2 A Caribbean Poetics: Fragmentation and Call-and-Response Tearing Apart Pictures of Paradise: Christopher Cozier’s Wait Dorothy Wait Visual Representations of the Caribbean Space: The Tropicalised Picturesque Wait Dorothy … Wait! Call-and-Response in Focus: Caribbean Popular culture/s A Questioning Spirit: Demasking and Mourning Searching for a New Language: She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks A Poetics of Interrelation: How to Read the Fragments of History Contrapuntal Voices: She Tries Her Tongue in Performance Conclusion: Silence Softly Breaks and the Archiving of Counter-Memory 3 Polyphonic Archives: Christopher Cozier’s Tropical Night and M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! Tropical Night: Fugal Narratives and Fluid Visual Vocabularies “Little Gestures with Notes” and “Afro-Ophelia” Zong!’s Fugal Aesthetics and the Poetics of Fragmentation Readership and Affect: Defend the Dead Counter-Archiving and Dialogic Spaces 4 Fragmentation and a Poetics of Location in The Farming of Bones and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Collective Memory in the Historiography of the “Trujillato” Documentation: Fictions of History and the Configuration of Collective Memory The Farming of Bones: Narrating Memory with No Audience The (Hi)Story of Oscar Wao: “Who Is More Sci-Fi Than Us?” Sites of Counter-Memory 5 Counter-Narratives in Black British and Caribbean Art in Britain From Context to Text. History and Aesthetics Memory, Drums, and Crossings Caribbean Visual Archive of Counter-Memories Ship Shape and Surge: Call-and-Response and the Reggae Aesthetic Engaging with History, Grappling with Erasure 6 “A Genealogy of Resistance” in Works by Inés María Martiatu Terry, Mayra Santos-Febres, and Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro Over the Waves: A Poetics of Contrapunto and Clave A Genealogy of Resistance: Negras and Fe en disfraz Memory Work in Mayra Santos-Febres and Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro Fé en disfraz: Archive and the Body as a Site of Memory 7 Coda Bibliography Index