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Chaucer called it ""spiritual manslaughter""; Barthes and Benjamin
deemed it dangerous linguistic nihilism. But 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. From the calypso singer's
superficially innocent rhymes to the vicious slanders published in
Trujillo-era gossip columns, words have been weapons, elevating one
person or group at the expense of another. Revising the overly
gendered existing critical frame, Rodriguez Navas argues that
gossip is a fundamentally adversarial practice. Just as whispers
and hearsay corrosively define and surveil identities, they also
empower writers to skirt sanitized, monolithic historical accounts
by weaving alternative versions of their nations' histories from
this self-governing discursive material. Reading recent fiction
from the Hispanic, Anglophone, and Francophone Caribbean and their
diasporas, alongside poetry, song lyrics, journalism, memoirs, and
political essays, Idle Talk, Deadly Talk maps gossip's place in the
Caribbean and reveals its rich possibilities as both literary theme
and narrative device. As a means for mediating contested
narratives, both public and private, gossip emerges as a vital
resource for scholars and writers grappling with the region's
troubled history.
Chaucer called it ""spiritual manslaughter""; Barthes and Benjamin
deemed it dangerous linguistic nihilism. But 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. From the calypso singer's
superficially innocent rhymes to the vicious slanders published in
Trujillo-era gossip columns, words have been weapons, elevating one
person or group at the expense of another. Revising the overly
gendered existing critical frame, Rodriguez Navas argues that
gossip is a fundamentally adversarial practice. Just as whispers
and hearsay corrosively define and surveil identities, they also
empower writers to skirt sanitized, monolithic historical accounts
by weaving alternative versions of their nations' histories from
this self-governing discursive material. Reading recent fiction
from the Hispanic, Anglophone, and Francophone Caribbean and their
diasporas, alongside poetry, song lyrics, journalism, memoirs, and
political essays, Idle Talk, Deadly Talk maps gossip's place in the
Caribbean and reveals its rich possibilities as both literary theme
and narrative device. As a means for mediating contested
narratives, both public and private, gossip emerges as a vital
resource for scholars and writers grappling with the region's
troubled history.
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