Postcolonial studies has taken a significant turn since 2000 from the post-structural focus on language and identity of the 1980s and 1990s to more materialist and sociological approaches. A key theorist in inspiring this innovative new scholarship has been Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu and Postcolonial Studies shows the emergence of this strand of postcolonialism through collecting texts that pioneered this approach-by Graham Huggan, Chris Bongie, and Sarah Brouillette-as well as emerging scholarship that follows the path these critics have established. This Bourdieu-inspired work examines the institutions that structure the creation, dissemination, and reception of world literature; the foundational values of the field and its sometimes ambivalent relationship to the popular; and the ways concepts like habitus, cultural capital, consecration and anamnesis can be deployed in reading postcolonial texts. Topics include explorations of the institutions of the field such as the B.B.C.'s Caribbean voices program and the South African publishing industry; analysis of Bourdieu's fieldwork in Algeria during the decolonization era; and comparisons between Bourdieu's work and alternative versions of literary sociology such as Pascale Casanova's and Franco Moretti's. The sociological approach to literature developed in the collected essays shows how, even if the commodification of postcolonialism threatens to neutralize the field's potential for resistance and opposition, a renewed project of postcolonial critique can be built in the contaminated spaces of globalization.

The years between the 1920s and 1970s are key for the development of Caribbean literature, producing the founding canonical literary texts of the Anglophone Caribbean. This volume features essays by major scholars as well as emerging voices revisiting important moments from that era to open up new perspectives. Caribbean contributions to the Harlem Renaissance, to the Windrush generation publishing in England after World War II, and to the regional reverberations of the Cuban Revolution all feature prominently in this story. At the same time, we uncover lesser known stories of writers publishing in regional newspapers and journals, of pioneering women writers, and of exchanges with Canada and the African continent. From major writers like Derek Walcott, V.S. Naipaul, George Lamming, and Jean Rhys to recently recuperated figures like Eric Walrond, Una Marson, Sylvia Wynter, and Ismith Khan, this volume sets a course for the future study of Caribbean literature.

Postcolonial studies has taken a significant turn since 2000 from the post-structural focus on language and identity of the 1980s and 1990s to more materialist and sociological approaches. A key theorist in inspiring this innovative new scholarship has been Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu and Postcolonial Studies shows the emergence of this strand of postcolonialism through collecting texts that pioneered this approach-by Graham Huggan, Chris Bongie, and Sarah Brouillette-as well as emerging scholarship that follows the path these critics have established. This Bourdieu-inspired work examines the institutions that structure the creation, dissemination, and reception of world literature; the foundational values of the field and its sometimes ambivalent relationship to the popular; and the ways concepts like habitus, cultural capital, consecration and anamnesis can be deployed in reading postcolonial texts. Topics include explorations of the institutions of the field such as the B.B.C.'s Caribbean voices program and the South African publishing industry; analysis of Bourdieu's fieldwork in Algeria during the decolonization era; and comparisons between Bourdieu's work and alternative versions of literary sociology such as Pascale Casanova's and Franco Moretti's. The sociological approach to literature developed in the collected essays shows how, even if the commodification of postcolonialism threatens to neutralize the field's potential for resistance and opposition, a renewed project of postcolonial critique can be built in the contaminated spaces of globalization.

Perspectives that shatter the stereotypes and expand understanding of a complex island nation Essays by Matthew Casey, Myriam J. A. Chancy, Bethany Aery Clerico, J. Michael Dash, Christopher Garland, Sibylle Fischer, Jeff Karem, David P. Kilroy, Nadeve Menard, and Lindsay Twa Haiti has long played an important role in global perception of the western hemisphere, but ideas about Haiti often appear paradoxical. Is it a land of tyranny and oppression or a beacon of freedom as site of the world's only successful slave revolution? A bastion of devilish practices or a devoutly religious island? Does its status as the second independent nation in the hemisphere give it special lessons to teach about postcolonialism, or is its main lesson one of failure? Haiti and the Americas brings together an interdisciplinary group of essays to examine the influence of Haiti throughout the hemisphere, to contextualize the ways that Haiti has been represented over time, and to look at Haiti's own cultural expressions in order to think about alternative ways of imagining its culture and history. Thinking about Haiti requires breaking through a thick layer of stereotypes. Haiti is often represented as the region's nadir of poverty, of political dysfunction, and of savagery. Contemporary media coverage fits very easily into the narrative of Haiti as a dependent nation, unable to govern or even fend for itself, a site of lawlessness that is in need of more powerful neighbors to take control. Essayists in Haiti and the Americas present a fuller picture, developing approaches that can account for the complexity of Haitian history and culture. Carla Calarge, Boca Raton, Florida, is assistant professor of French and Francophone studies at Florida Atlantic University. Her work has appeared in French Forum, French Review, and Presence Francophone, among others. Raphael Dalleo, Delray Beach, Florida, is associate professor of English at Florida Atlantic University. He is author of Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere: From the Plantation to the Postcolonial and coauthor of The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of Post-Sixties Literature. Luis Duno-Gottberg, Houston, Texas, is associate professor of Caribbean studies and film at Rice University. He is the author of Solventar las diferencias: La ideologia del mestizaje en Cuba and Albert Camus, Naturaleza: Patria y Exilio. Clevis Headley, Delray Beach, Florida, is associate professor of philosophy at Florida Atlantic University. He is the coeditor of Shifting the Geography of Reason: Gender, Science and Religion.

In this volume, the editors and authors strive to understand the evolving Trans-Caribbean as a discontinuous, displacing and displaced, transnational space. It considers the imagined community in the islands as its psycho-social homeland, while simultaneously pursuing different cultural strategies of redefining and resisting colonial 'homeland' conventions (which Kamau Brathwaite appropriately termed the 'inner plantation'). Thus, the Trans-Caribbean is suspended in a double-dialectic, which opposes both the hegemonic metropolitan space inhabited, as well as the romanticized, yet colonialized, 'inner plantation, ' whose transcendence via migration perpetually turns out to be an illusion. Given this, cultural production and migration remain at the vortex of the Trans-Caribbean. The construction of cultural products in the Trans-Caribbean understood as a collection of social and new migratory practices both reflects and contests post-colonial metropolitan hegemonies. Following Arjun Appadurai's distinction, these homogenizing and heterogenizing counter-trends in Trans-Cariabbean spaces can be observed through cultural transactions manifesting themselves as ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, cityscapes, ideoscapes, etc. For the purposes of this book the editors invited anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, linguists, liberal arts and gender studies specialists, as well as cultural and literary historians to begin drawing some of the diasporic trajectories on the huge canvas of cultural production throughout the Trans-Caribbean.Constructing Vernacular Culture in the Trans-Caribbean will find its audience among scholars in cultural studies, migration, literary theory, and cultural criticism who have a special interest in Caribbean and Latin American Studies, as well as among students and scholars of migration and postcolonialism and postmodernity in general."