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essay on caribbean culture
essay on caribbean culture
essay on caribbean culture
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“…in spite of the gift of language, Caliban remains too heavily mired in nature for its uplifting powers of reason and civilization.”- (Paget, 20)
“Break a vase, and the love that resembles the fragments is greater than the love which took its symmetry for granted when it was a whole.” (Walcott, Nobel Speech)
The issue of cultural blend is central to Caribbean poetics and politics. The poetics of this ‘New World’ claimed to emerge from a landscape devoid of narrative, without history. Yet, Derek Walcott’s poetry is replete with allusions to history, with an undercutting of the imposed past, with an emphasis on language being central to knowledge, with a poet-speaker whose figure is an enmeshing of both the public and the personal. In his Nobel acceptance speech, Derek Walcott, contemplating “the proportions of the ideal Caribbean city”, proposes that
“it would be so racially various that the cultures of the world – the Asiatic, the Mediterranean, the European, the African – would be represented in it . . . Its citizens would intermarry as they chose, from instinct, not tradition, until their children found it increasingly futile to trace their genealogy.”
Walcott’s poetry is informed by the blend of cultures (Caribbean and ‘Western’) in which he finds himself. He does manifest a peculiar “schizophrenia” where he is “wrenched by two styles”, but also works with it as a politics of parodying the colonizer/outsider whose influence has infiltrated into his own cultural coordinates. Yet this parody is not completely devoid of identification with “the intimate enemy” (Ashish Nandy,1983), sometimes even to the extent of embracing the ‘other’. Walcott insists that no moment of ‘original’ national ‘purity’ should dominate the ima...
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7. Gates, Henry Louis (Jr.). The Signifyin(g) Monkey. Oxford: Oxford University press, 1988. Print.
8. Paget, Henry. Caliban’s Reason. New York: Routledge, 2000. Print.
9. Spivak, Gayatri. The Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Print.
10. Torres-Saillant, Silvio. Caribbean Poetics: towards an aesthetic of West Indian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Print.
11. Walcott, Derek.-
-Collected Poems. New York: Farrar, Giroux, Strauss, 1986. Print.
-Dream on Monkey-mountain and Other Plays. New York: Farrar, Giroux, Strauss, 1970. Print.
-Nobel Acceptance Speech, December, 1992. Accessed on 13th April, 2014, 11:12AM
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1992/walcott-lecture.html
12. Young, Robert J.C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, Race. London: Routledge, 1995. Print.
The novel deals with the pain and pleasure of the past and present and how that effects the identity construction of an individual. The ethnic/racial identity of an individual can be influences by the complexities of a post-colonial society filled with social clashes, inferiority, and the othering of individuals. The novel focuses on the Haitians who have migrated to the Dominican Republic to escape poverty but are still alienated and devalued because of their poor economical conditions. By migrating to the Dominican Republic and crossing the boundary between the two countries they are symbolically being marked as ‘other’ and seen as ‘inferior’ by
History can significantly influence the ways in which a place, along with its community, evolves. Now considered postcolonial, not only are Hawaii and Antigua heavily defined by their colonial pasts, but they are also systematically forced into enduring the consequences of their unfavorable histories. Through their unconventionally enlightening essays, Jamaica Kincaid and Juliana Spahr offer compelling insights into how the same idea that exists as a tourist’s perception of paradise also exists as an unprofitable reality for the natives who are trapped in their pasts yet ironically labeled as independent. The lasting impacts of colonialism on the history of Antigua and Hawaii can be noted through their lasting subservience to their colonizing
15. Burton, Richard D.E. Afro-Creole: Power, Opposition and Play in the Caribbean. (1997). Cornell University Press.
It is a way to crucially engage oneself in setting the stage for new interventions and connections. She also emphasized that she personally viewed poetry as the embodiment of one’s personal experiences, and she challenged what the white, European males have imbued in society, as she declared, “I speak here of poetry as the revelation or distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean — in order to cover their desperate wish for imagination without insight.”
...d issues of post-colonialism in Crossing the Mangrove. It is clear that Conde favors multiplicity when it comes to ideas of language, narrative, culture, and identity. The notion that anything can be understood through one, objective lens is destroyed through her practice of intertextuality, her crafting of one character's story through multiple perspectives, and her use of the motif of trees and roots. In the end, everything – the literary canon, Creole identity, narrative – is jumbled, chaotic, and rhizomic; in general, any attempts at decryption require the employment of multiple (aforementioned) methodologies.
Derek Walcott’s poem A Latin Primer focuses on the influence of Walcott’s education on the process of becoming a poet, the tension between the education opportunities provided by the privileged elite and the richness of folk traditions preserved by the oppressed majority.
One of the most well known historic characteristics of poetry is that of rhyme, a technique that Alexander rejects. In American Sublime, every poem is written in free verse. Although some poems may contain an occasional slant rhyme, there is no fixed rhyme scheme in Alexander’s works. Along with her lack of rhyme, there is a no consistency in the structure of Elizabeth Alexander’s poetry. This is best demonstrated in the “Amistad” section of American Sublime. Each of the poems in this part tell a piece of the story of the Amistad ship and the slave revolt. However, only a few of these poems share similar structures. While some poems contain seven stanzas, others a written in haikus, and while others do not contain stanza breaks, making the poem one long stanza. By doing this, Elizabeth Alexander keeps herself from having a signature structure for her poems. Instead, by neglecting to use a specific style, Alexander creates a stark distinction between herself and other
Edyta, O. (1996). Jamaica KIncaid's Lucy. Cultural Translation as a case of creative exploration of the past, 143.
The Modernist era of poetry, like all reactionary movements, was directed, influenced, and determined by the events preceding it. The gradual shift away from the romanticized writing of the Victorian Era served as a litmus test for the values, and the shape of poetry to come. Adopting this same idea, William Carlos Williams concentrated his poetry in redirecting the course of Modernist writing, continuing a break from the past in more ways than he saw being done, particularly by T.S. Eliot, an American born poet living abroad. Eliot’s monumental poem, The Waste Land, was a historically rooted, worldly conscious work that was brought on by the effects of World War One. The implementation of literary allusions versus imagination was one point that Williams attacked Eliot over, but was Williams completely in stride with his own guidelines? Looking closely at Williams’s reactionary poem to The Waste Land, Spring and All, we can question whether or not he followed the expectations he anticipated of Modernist work; the attempts to construct new art in the midst of a world undergoing sweeping changes.
societies to reexamine their view of the Caribbean. In this paper the following topics in The
This week’s articles carry a couple related, if not common, themes of imagined, if not artificial, constructs of race and identity. Martha Hodes’ article, “The mercurial Nature and Abiding Power of Race: A Transnational Family Story,” offers a narrative based examination of the malleable terms on which race was defined. To accomplish this she examines the story of Eunice Connolly and her family and social life as a window into understanding the changing dimensions of race in nineteenth-century America and the Caribbean, specifically New England and Grand Cayman. While Hodes’ article examines the construction of race in the Americas, Ali A. Mazrui’s piece, “The Re-Invention of Africa: Edward Sai, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Beyond,” looks at the construction of African identity. Although different in geographic loci, the two articles similarly examine the shaping influences of race and identity and the power held in ‘the Other’ to those ends.
Caliban himself embodies many of the characteristics that civilized Europeans came to associate with the "primitive natives" of the New World. As in the Elizabethan stereotype, Caliban is without moral restraint, and, more specifically, he is lustful in the same way that Native Americans were viewed in the early seventeenth century as dang...
Jamaica Kincaid in her essay “In History” describes how Antigua’s language, as part of cultural imperialism, was made inferior in favor of western languages. Columbus framed the unfamiliar environment of Antigua with things prominent in his thinking and his Spanish
Every human being, in addition to having their own personal identity, has a sense of who they are in relation to the larger community--the nation. Postcolonial studies is the attempt to strip away conventional perspective and examine what that national identity might be for a postcolonial subject. To read literature from the perspective of postcolonial studies is to seek out--to listen for, that indigenous, representative voice which can inform the world of the essence of existence as a colonial subject, or as a postcolonial citizen. Postcolonial authors use their literature and poetry to solidify, through criticism and celebration, an emerging national identity, which they have taken on the responsibility of representing. Surely, the reevaluation of national identity is an eventual and essential result of a country gaining independence from a colonial power, or a country emerging from a fledgling settler colony. However, to claim to be representative of that entire identity is a huge undertaking for an author trying to convey a postcolonial message. Each nation, province, island, state, neighborhood and individual is its own unique amalgamation of history, culture, language and tradition. Only by understanding and embracing the idea of cultural hybridity when attempting to explore the concept of national identity can any one individual, or nation, truly hope to understand or communicate the lasting effects of the colonial process.
The Poetry of Judith Wright Abstract This report discusses the influences of Australia, as well as the universal impact on the poetry of Judith Wright. It contains an evaluation of both the techniques and the "plot" behind the poems "Remittance Man", "South of My Days" and "Eve to her Daughters" as well as a comparison between the three poems. Australia, as Wrights homeland, has had a significant effect on the content of her poems but references to English scenes are also consistent as well as general references to the universal world. Eve to her daughter. ?