This book explores the humanities as an insightful platform for understanding and responding to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, other manifestations of "Guantanamo," and the contested place of freedom in American Empire. It presents the work of scholars and writers based in Cuba's Guantanamo Province and various parts of the US. Its essays, short stories, poetry, and other texts engage the far-reaching meaning and significance of Gitmo by bringing together what happens on the U.S. side of the fence-or "la cerca," as it is called in Cuba-with perspectives from the outside world. Chapters include critiques of artistic renderings of the Guantanamo region; historical narratives contemplating the significance of freedom; analyses of the ways the base and region inform the Cuban imaginary; and fiction and poetry published for the first time in English. Not simply a critique of imperialism, this volume presents politically engaged commentary that suggests a way forward for a site of global contact and conflict.

This book explores the humanities as an insightful platform for understanding and responding to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, other manifestations of "Guantanamo," and the contested place of freedom in American Empire. It presents the work of scholars and writers based in Cuba's Guantanamo Province and various parts of the US. Its essays, short stories, poetry, and other texts engage the far-reaching meaning and significance of Gitmo by bringing together what happens on the U.S. side of the fence-or "la cerca," as it is called in Cuba-with perspectives from the outside world. Chapters include critiques of artistic renderings of the Guantanamo region; historical narratives contemplating the significance of freedom; analyses of the ways the base and region inform the Cuban imaginary; and fiction and poetry published for the first time in English. Not simply a critique of imperialism, this volume presents politically engaged commentary that suggests a way forward for a site of global contact and conflict.

"An unashamedly sexy collection" (Glamour) featuring today's top female writers hiding behind naughty pseudonyms. A unique and sexy collection of bedtime stories by bestselling, award- winning, and well-known novelists delivering the goods under their X- rated pseudonyms. So who's who? We're not telling. After all, a woman should have at least one good secret. Feturing Adele Parks, Ali Smith, Bella Pollen, Chris Manby, Daisy Waugh, Emma Darwin, Esther Freud, Fay Weldon, Jane Moore, Joan Smith, Joanne Harris, Justine Picardi, Louise Doughty, Rachel Johnson, Santa Montefiore, Stella Duffy, Imogen Edwards-Jones, Jessica Adams, Kathy Lette, and Maggie Alderson.

A story of love, violence, and race set at the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution in 1791, African American writer Arna Bontemps's Drums at Dusk immerses readers in the opulent and brutal -- yet also very fragile -- society of France's richest colony, Saint Domingue. First published in 1939, this novel explores the complex web of tensions connecting wealthy plantation owners, poor whites, free people of color, and the slaves who stunned the colony and the globe by uniting in a carefully planned uprising. The novel's hero, Diron Desautels, a white Creole born in Saint Domingue who belongs to the French antislavery group Soci?t? des Amis des Noirs, attempts to spread his message of "liberty, equality, fraternity" in a world fraught with conflict.

Imaginatively inhabiting a wide spectrum of Haitian voices, including those of white indentured servants, female slaves, and Toussaint L'Ouverture, who later emerged as the revolution's best-known hero, Bontemps's work reflects not only the intricacies of Haitian society on the eve of the revolution, but also a black artist's vision of Haiti in the twentieth century, during the U.S. Marines' occupation and at the brink of war in Europe.

A new introduction by Michael P. Bibler and Jessica Adams reveals how Drums at Dusk -- even seventy years after its original publication -- contributes to contemporary studies of the American South as part of the larger plantation region of the Caribbean and inspires a reevaluation of assumptions about revolution, race, and nationalism.

From Storyville brothels and narratives of turn-of-the-century New Orleans to plantation tours, Bette Davis films, Elvis memorials, Willa Cather's fiction, and the annual prison rodeo held at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, Jessica Adams considers spatial and ideological evolutions of southern plantations after slavery. In ""Wounds of Returning"", Adams shows that the slave past returns to inhabit plantation landscapes that have been radically transformed by tourism, consumer culture, and modern modes of punishment - even those landscapes from which slavery has supposedly been banished completely. Adams explores how the commodification of black bodies during slavery did not disappear with abolition - rather, the same principle was transformed into modern consumer capitalism. As Adams demonstrates, however, counter-narratives and unexpected cultural hybrids erupt out of attempts to re-create the plantation as an uncomplicated scene of racial relationships or a signifier of national unity. Peeling back the layers of plantation landscapes, Adams reveals connections between seemingly disparate features of modern culture, suggesting that they remain haunted by the force of the unnatural equation of people as property.

Just Below South is the first book to examine the U.S. South and the Caribbean as a "regional interculture" shaped by performance--as a space defined not so much by a shared set of geographical boundaries or by a single, common culture as by the weave of performances and identities moving across and throughout it. By offering fresh ways for thinking about region, language, and performance, the volume helps to reimagine the possibilities for American Studies. It advances beyond current analyses of historical or literary commonalities between the South and the Caribbean to explore startling and significant connections between a range of performances, including Trinidadian carnival, Civil War reenactments, the Martinican dance form kalenda, dramatic adaptations of Uncle Tom's Cabin, rituals of spirit possession, the teaching of Haitian Kreyol, the translation of Louisiana Creole, and the imaginative "travels" of southern and Caribbean writers.

While generating textual conversations among scholars of Francophone, Anglophone, and Hispanophone literature and culture and forging innovative ties between cultural studies, performance studies, linguistics, literary analysis, and studies of the African diaspora, these essays raise provocative new questions about race, ethnicity, gender, class, and nationality.

ContributorsJessica Adams, University of California, Berkeley * Carolyn Vellenga Berman, The New School * Anne Malena, University of Alberta * Cecile Accilien, Columbus State University, Georgia * Don E. Walicek, University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras * Julian Gerstin, San Jose State University * Rawle Gibbons, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine * Kathleen M. Gough, University of Glasgow * Shirley Toland-Dix, University of South Florida, Tampa * Michael P. Bibler, University of Mary Washington * Jana Evans Braziel, University of Cincinnati