Since its demise in the nineteenth century, slavery has given
rise to an outpouring of literatures that reflect the diversity of
its hemispheric legacy, but the discipline of literary studies has
been reluctant to admit commonalities among former slave societies
in the New World. Examining major novels from the 1880s to the
1970s, George B. Handley shows how fiction from different nations
shares what he calls textual simultaneity in revealing parallel
narrative anxieties about genealogy, narrative authority, and
racial difference.
In comparing these novels, Handley demonstrates the ways in
which, ironically, U.S. culture tried to shed its own miscegenated
Caribbean image of itself during the time of its greatest expansion
into the Caribbean. He argues that imperialism was a means by which
the United States could pretend to its own whiteness and
civilization by creating a new extranational miscegenation. At the
same time, the United States' encroachment in the Caribbean created
an environment in which the islands' cultures called upon divergent
discourses on the legacies of slavery to retain a sense of
autonomy.
By offering a critique of current postslavery literary criticism
in the Americas as well as exemplary comparative readings of novels
by important postslavery writers--including William Faulkner, Toni
Morrison, Alejo Carpentier, Jean Rhys, Charles Chesnutt, Cirilo
Villaverde, Rosario Ferre, and others--Handley seeks to address the
major questions raised by this abundance of postslavery literature
and finds meaningful correspondences that begin to show the
outlines of a larger tradition of postslavery literature in the
Americas.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!