Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere: From the Plantation to the Postcolonial

Description

Bringing together the most exciting recent archival work in anglophone, francophone, and hispanophone Caribbean studies, Raphael Dalleo constructs a new literary history of the region that is both comprehensive and innovative. He examines how changes in political, economic, and social structures have produced different sets of possibilities for writers to imagine their relationship to the institutions of the public sphere. In the process, he provides a new context for rereading such major writers as Mary Seacole, Jose Marti, Jacques Roumain, Claude McKay, Marie Chauvet, and George Lamming, while also drawing lesser-known figures into the story. Dalleo's comparative approach will be important to Caribbeanists from all of the region's linguistic traditions, and his book contributes even more broadly to debates in Latin American and postcolonial studies about postmodernity and globalization. Contents Preface Introduction Part One 1 The Abolitionist Public Sphere and the Republic of the Lettered 2 The Public Sphere Unbound Part Two 3 The Intellectual and the Man of Action 4 The Ideology of the Literary Part Three 5 The Expulsion from the Public Sphere 6 Anticolonial Authority and the Postcolonial Occasion for Speaking 7 The Testimonial Impulse 8 Cultural Studies and the Commodified Public Conclusion Notes Works Cited Index