Practices of Resistance in the Caribbean: Narratives, Aesthetics, Politics

Description

The Caribbean has played a crucial geopolitical role in the Western pursuit of economic dominance, yet Eurocentric research usually treats the Caribbean as a peripheral region, consequently labelling the inhabitants as beings without agency. Examining asymmetrical relations of power in the Greater Caribbean in historical and contemporary perspectives, this volume explores the region’s history of resistance and subversion of oppressive structures against the backdrop of the Caribbean’s central role for the accumulation of wealth of European and North American actors and the respective dialectics of modernity/coloniality, through a variety of experiences inducing migration, transnational exchange and transculturation. Contributors approach the Caribbean as an empowered space of opposition and agency and focus on perspectives of the region as a place of entanglements with a long history of political and cultural practices of resistance to colonization, inequality, heteronomy, purity, invisibilization, and exploitation. An important contribution to the literature on agency and resistance in the Caribbean, this volume offers a new perspective on the region as a geopolitically, economically and culturally crucial space, and it will interest researchers in the fields of Caribbean politics, literature and heritage, colonialism, entangled histories, global studies perspectives, ethnicity, gender, and migration. Cover Title Copyright Contents List of figures and table List of contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: Narratives, politics, and aesthetics of resistance across the Caribbean and its diasporas PART I Narratives of/as resistance: Languages, poetics, and politics in Caribbean literatures 1 Using folklore to challenge contemporary social norms: Papa Bois, Mama D’Lo, and environmentalism in Caribbean literature 2 Shadows pass the surface: Decolonial (re)configurations of indigenous presence in Merle Collins’s The Colour of Forgetting 3 Acts of translanguaging and marooning as forms of resistance in French Caribbean literature 4 From anti-colonial to anti-modernist resistance: Historiopoetic transformations of the Maroon in slected works of Édouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant 5 Cultures of resistance: Dialectical images of the Haitian Revolution in Haitian culture and literature 6 Postcolonial poetics: El reino de este mundo and the resistance of lo real maravilloso PART II Resistance in/as activism: From theory to practice and back 7 Caribbean activism for slavery reparations: An overview 8 Debated existences, claimed histories: Black Indigenous women’s diasporic lives in Costa Rica 9 Una Universidad Tomada: Resistance performances in the (re)construction of spaces of resistance and contention during the first wave of the 2010–2011 University of Puerto Rico student movement 10 Troubling our intersections: A Caribbean feminist methodology as resistance approach 11 Practices of resistance and cyberfeminism in Cuba 12 Racism vs. socialism in Cuba: A misplaced conflict (notes on/against internal colonialism) 13 “Let us be Moors”: Conversion to Islam in Cuba 14 Thinking resistance: Critique and resistance in the philosophical concepts of Foucault and in the postcolonial and decolonial theories of Bhabha and Mignolo Index