Performance and personhood in Caribbean literature : from Alexis to the digital age / Jeannine Murray-Román.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Murray-Román, Jeannine, 1977- author.

Series:

New World studies

New world studies

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Caribbean literature--20th century--History and criticism.

Caribbean literature.

Performance in literature.

Self-perception in literature.

Literature and society--Caribbean Area--History--20th century.

Literature and society.

History.

Caribbean Area.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

History.

Physical Description:

ix, 244 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Charlottesville ; London : University of Virginia Press, [2016]

Summary:

Focusing on the literary representation of performance practices in anglophone, francophone, and hispanophone Caribbean literature, Jeannine Murray-Roman shows how a shared regional aesthetic emerges from the descriptions of music, dance, and oral storytelling events. Because the historical circumstances that led to the development of performance traditions supersede the geopolitical and linguistic divisions of colonialism, the literary uses of these traditions resonate across the linguistic boundaries of the region. The author thus identifies the aesthetic that emerges from the act of writing about live arts and moving bodies as a practice that is grounded in the historically, geographically, and culturally specific features of the Caribbean itself. Working with twentieth- and twenty-first-century sources ranging from theatrical works and novels to blogs, Murray-Román examines the ways in which writers such as Jacques Stephen Alexis, Zoé Valdés, Rosario Ferré, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Marlon lames experiment with textually compensating for the loss of the corporeality of live relationship in performance traditions. Through their exploration of the interaction of literature and performance, she argues, Caribbean writers themselves offer a mode of bridging the disjunction between cultural and philosophical approaches within Caribbean studies. Book jacket.

Contents:

Performance and the expansion of personhood in Marissa Chibas's Daughter of a Cuban revolutionary

Creole's thinking body: Patrick Chamoiseau and Marlon James

From spectator to participant: audience formation in Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Tres tristes tigres, Oonya Kempadoo's Tide running, and Ernest Pépin's L'envers du décor

Staceyann Chin and Zoé Valdés: sexilic politics in the blogosphere

Dansez et revivez!": reviving personhood in Rosario Ferre's "Maquinolandera" and Jacques Stephen Alexis's Les arbres musiciens

Coda.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 221-237) and index.

ISBN:

9780813938479

0813938473

9780813938486

0813938481

OCLC:

918616218