Bücher der Reihe New World Studies

Examines the ways in which the ""romance"" trope is employed within contemporary Caribbean popular culture and literature to idealize the newly independent postcolonial societies of the region. These essays situate this discourse of idealization within its historical and cultural contexts.

Examines seven plays by Ina Cesaire, Maryse Conde, Gerty Dambury, and Simone Schwarz-Bart that premiered in the French Caribbean or in France in the 1980s and 1990s and soon thereafter travelled to the United States. Emily Sahakian argues that these late-twentieth-century plays by French Caribbean women writers dramatize and enact creolization.

Explores the changing place of Latin America in US culture from the mid-nineteenth century to the recent US-Cuba detente. In doing so, it uncovers the complex ways in which Americans have imagined the global geography of poverty and progress, as the hemispheric imperialism of the nineteenth century yielded to the Cold War discourse of "underdevelopment".

This work presents links between the myth of Caribbean Paradise and colonial ideologies and economics. It considers the cultural, economic and social effects of tourism's contemporary Caribbean and explores the way post colonial writers have responded to the paradise-plantation dichotomy.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, the idea of independence inspired radical changes across the French-speaking world. Julie-Francoise Tolliver examines the links that writers from Quebec, the Caribbean, and Africa imagined to unite that world, illuminating the tropes they used to articulate solidarities across the race and class differences.

Examines a group of early nineteenth-century novels by white creoles, writers whose identities and perspectives were shaped by their experiences in Britain's Caribbean colonies. White creoles faced a considerable challenge in showing they were driven by more than a desire for power and profit. Crossing the Line explores the integral role early creole novels played in this cultural labour.

Offers a comprehensive analysis of Edwidge Danticat's exploration of the dialogic relationship between nation and diaspora. NadTHge T. Clitandre argues that Danticat - moving between novels, short stories, and essays - articulates a diasporic consciousness that acts as a social, political, and cultural transformation at the local and global level.

Gossip - long derided and dismissed by writers and intellectuals - is far from frivolous. In Idle Talk, Deadly Talk, Ana Rodriguez Navas reveals gossip to be an urgent, utilitarian, and deeply political practice - a means of staging the narrative tensions, and waging the narrative battles, that mark Caribbean politics and culture.

The Afrocubanismo was an artistic and intellectual movement in Cuba in the 1920s and 1930s that tried to convey a national and racial identity through poetry. This book treats the poetry of this movement, and questions the assumption that the poetry did manage to symbolize racial reconciliation and unification.

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 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.

From Zora Neale Hurston to Derek Walcott to Toni Morrison, New World black authors have written about African-derived religious traditions and spiritual practices. The Sacred Act of Reading examines religion and sociopolitical power in modern and contemporary texts of a variety of genres from the black Americas.

In 1979, the Marxist-Leninist New Jewel Movement under Maurice Bishop overthrew the government of the Caribbean island country of Grenada, establishing the People's Revolutionary Government. Laurie Lambert offers the first comprehensive study of how gender and sexuality produced different narratives of the Grenada Revolution.

Examines Langston Hughes's associations with a number of black writers from the Caribbean and Africa, exploring the implications of recognising these multiple facets of the African American literary icon and of taking a truly transnational approach to his life, work, and influence.

Considers how certain literary texts confront the dominant and, at times, exaggerated anti-Haitian Dominican ideology. Megan Jeanette Myers examines the antagonistic portrayal of the two nations, endeavouring to reposition Haiti on the literary map of the Dominican Republic and beyond.

Looks at how fiction from the American tropics written since 1950 engages with the promise of El Dorado in the age of the Anthropocene. Just as the golden kingdom was never found, natural resource extraction has not produced wealth and happiness for the peoples of the tropics.

Combining research, political philosophy, and intellectual history, this book explores the invention of universal emancipation - both in the context of the Age of Enlightenment and in relation to certain key figures and trends in contemporary political philosophy.