Caribbean perspectives on modernity : returning Medusa's gaze / Maria Cristina Fumagalli.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Fumagalli, Maria Cristina.

Series:

New World studies.

New World Studies

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Caribbean literature (English)--History and criticism.

Caribbean literature (English).

Caribbean Area--In literature.

Caribbean Area.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (209 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Charlottesville, Va. ; London : University of Virginia Press, c2009.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Taking up the challenge of redefining modernity from a Caribbean perspective instead of assuming that the North Atlantic view of modernity is universal, Maria Cristina Fumagalli shows how the Caribbean's contributions to the modern world not only provide a more accurate account of the past but also have the potential to change the way in which we imagine the future. Fumagalli uses the myth of Medusa's gaze turning people into stone to describe the way North Atlantic modernity freezes its "others" into a state of perpetual backwardness that produces an ethnocentric narrative based on homogenization, vilification, and disempowerment that actively ignores what fails to conform to the story it wants to tell about itself. In analyzing narratives of modernity that originate in the Caribbean, the author explores the region's refusal to succumb to Medusa's spell and highlights its strategies to outstare the Gorgon. Reflecting a diversity of texts, genres, and media, the chapters focus on sixteenth-century engravings and paintings from the Netherlands and Italy, a scientific romance produced at the turn of the twentieth century by the king of the Caribbean island Redonda, contemporary collections of poetry from the anglophone Caribbean, a historical novel by the Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé, a Latin epic, a Homeric hymn, ancient Egyptian rites, fairy tales, romances from England and Jamaica, a long narrative poem by the Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott, and paintings by artists from Europe and the Americas spanning the seventeenth century to the present. Caribbean Perspectives on Modernity offers an original and creative contribution to what it means to be modern.

Contents:

Cover

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Breaking Medusa's Spell

1 Abreast with History: Stradanus's America and Grace Nichols's Fat Black Woman

2 What It Means to Be Modern: M. P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud

3 Scapegoating the Mulattos: Maryse Condé's La Migration des coeurs

4 Before and after Ovid: Metamorphosis in Marlene Nourbese Philip and Gabriel García Márquez

5 Romances That Matter: Lady Mary Wroth's The Countesse of Montgomerie Urania and Erna Brodber's Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home

6 Brushing History against the Grain: Derek Walcott's Tiepolo's Hound

Conclusion: The Power of Interpellation

Notes

Bibliography

Index

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

Z.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from title page (ebrary, viewed May 6, 2013).

ISBN:

0-8139-2999-7

OCLC:

784958304