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Teaching, Reading, and Theorizing Caribbean Texts explores alternative approaches to Caribbean texts from transnational and multilingual perspectives. The authors query what new systems and criteria can be implemented to rethink and remodel our theoretical and pedagogical corpus and alter the lenses through which we study Caribbean texts. Pulling from the Caribbean's global diaspora, the authors examine writers such as Roxane Gay, Esmeralda Santiago, Wilson Harris, and Gloria Anzaldúa in order to resituate the place of Caribbean texts in the classroom.
Each chapter argues for a reunification of Caribbean literature studies-rather than studying this body of text only in terms of a certain aspect of its history or culture, the authors necessitate the importance of analyzing these works from a pan-Caribbean perspective. This collection discusses the ideas of transcending individual disciplines and specialties to create global theories, overcoming pedagogical challenges when bringing Caribbean texts into the classroom, and (re)reading texts with the purpose of discovering new symbols, themes, and meanings.
List of contents
Introduction, Jeanne Jégousso and Emily O'Dell
Chapter 1: World Literature or Littérature-monde: A Pedagogical Approach to Maryse Condé's Victoire, les saveurs et les mots: récit, Kristina S. Gibby
Chapter 2: In and Out of the Academic Ghetto: Overcoming Segregation and Embracing Marginalisation in the Teaching of Caribbean Literature at a UK University, Hazel Mackenzie
Chapter 3: "Once Upon a Time, in a Nearby Hell": Roxane Gay's An Untamed State and Reading, Writing, and Teaching Haiti, Christopher Garland
Chapter 4: Dub, Saltfish, and Majah Hype: Caribbean Diaspora as a Praxis with Theory, Cathy Thomas
Chapter 5: The Child Ethnographer in Autofictional Literature of the Spanish Caribbean: Esmeralda Santiago's When I Was Puerto Rican, Emily O'Dell
Chapter 6: Creolizing the Chasms of Humanity: Threshold Passages in Wilson Harris and Gloria Anzaldúa's Cross-Cultural Poetics, Michael Grafals
Chapter 7: Beyond the Scribal Canon: Re-inserting Caribbean Vernacular 'Texts' Into Theory, R. Anthony Lewis
Chapter 8: The Poetics of Liminality in Alfred Alexandre's Le bar des Amériques, Jeanne Jégousso
About the author
Emily A. O'Dell is lecturer of English at George College and State University.
Jeanne Jégousso is assistant professor of French and Francophone studies at Hollins University.
