Constructing Vernacular Culture in the Trans-Caribbean
In this volume, the editors and authors strive to understand the evolving Trans-Caribbean as a discontinuous, displacing and displaced, transnational space. It considers the imagined community in the islands as its psycho-social homeland, while simultaneously pursuing different cultural strategies of redefining and resisting colonial 'homeland' conventions (which Kamau Brathwaite appropriately termed the 'inner plantation'). Thus, the Trans-Caribbean is suspended in a double-dialectic, which opposes both the hegemonic metropolitan space inhabited, as well as the romanticized, yet colonialized, 'inner plantation,' whose transcendence via migration perpetually turns out to be an illusion. Given this, cultural production and migration remain at the vortex of the Trans-Caribbean. The construction of cultural products in the Trans-Caribbean—understood as a collection of social and new migratory practices—both reflects and contests post-colonial metropolitan hegemonies. Following Arjun Appadurai's distinction, these homogenizing and heterogenizing counter-trends in Trans-Cariabbean spaces can be observed through cultural transactions manifesting themselves as ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, cityscapes, ideoscapes, etc. For the purposes of this book the editors invited anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, linguists, liberal arts and gender studies specialists, as well as cultural and literary historians to begin drawing some of the diasporic trajectories on the huge canvas of cultural production throughout the Trans-Caribbean.Constructing Vernacular Culture in the Trans-Caribbean will find its audience among scholars in cultural studies, migration, literary theory, and cultural criticism who have a special interest in Caribbean and Latin American Studies, as well as among students and scholars of migration and postcolonialism and postmodernity in general.
1120458687
Constructing Vernacular Culture in the Trans-Caribbean
In this volume, the editors and authors strive to understand the evolving Trans-Caribbean as a discontinuous, displacing and displaced, transnational space. It considers the imagined community in the islands as its psycho-social homeland, while simultaneously pursuing different cultural strategies of redefining and resisting colonial 'homeland' conventions (which Kamau Brathwaite appropriately termed the 'inner plantation'). Thus, the Trans-Caribbean is suspended in a double-dialectic, which opposes both the hegemonic metropolitan space inhabited, as well as the romanticized, yet colonialized, 'inner plantation,' whose transcendence via migration perpetually turns out to be an illusion. Given this, cultural production and migration remain at the vortex of the Trans-Caribbean. The construction of cultural products in the Trans-Caribbean—understood as a collection of social and new migratory practices—both reflects and contests post-colonial metropolitan hegemonies. Following Arjun Appadurai's distinction, these homogenizing and heterogenizing counter-trends in Trans-Cariabbean spaces can be observed through cultural transactions manifesting themselves as ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, cityscapes, ideoscapes, etc. For the purposes of this book the editors invited anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, linguists, liberal arts and gender studies specialists, as well as cultural and literary historians to begin drawing some of the diasporic trajectories on the huge canvas of cultural production throughout the Trans-Caribbean.Constructing Vernacular Culture in the Trans-Caribbean will find its audience among scholars in cultural studies, migration, literary theory, and cultural criticism who have a special interest in Caribbean and Latin American Studies, as well as among students and scholars of migration and postcolonialism and postmodernity in general.
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Overview

In this volume, the editors and authors strive to understand the evolving Trans-Caribbean as a discontinuous, displacing and displaced, transnational space. It considers the imagined community in the islands as its psycho-social homeland, while simultaneously pursuing different cultural strategies of redefining and resisting colonial 'homeland' conventions (which Kamau Brathwaite appropriately termed the 'inner plantation'). Thus, the Trans-Caribbean is suspended in a double-dialectic, which opposes both the hegemonic metropolitan space inhabited, as well as the romanticized, yet colonialized, 'inner plantation,' whose transcendence via migration perpetually turns out to be an illusion. Given this, cultural production and migration remain at the vortex of the Trans-Caribbean. The construction of cultural products in the Trans-Caribbean—understood as a collection of social and new migratory practices—both reflects and contests post-colonial metropolitan hegemonies. Following Arjun Appadurai's distinction, these homogenizing and heterogenizing counter-trends in Trans-Cariabbean spaces can be observed through cultural transactions manifesting themselves as ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, cityscapes, ideoscapes, etc. For the purposes of this book the editors invited anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, linguists, liberal arts and gender studies specialists, as well as cultural and literary historians to begin drawing some of the diasporic trajectories on the huge canvas of cultural production throughout the Trans-Caribbean.Constructing Vernacular Culture in the Trans-Caribbean will find its audience among scholars in cultural studies, migration, literary theory, and cultural criticism who have a special interest in Caribbean and Latin American Studies, as well as among students and scholars of migration and postcolonialism and postmodernity in general.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780739121610
Publisher: Lexington Books
Publication date: 11/13/2007
Series: Caribbean Studies
Pages: 432
Product dimensions: 6.07(w) x 9.08(h) x 1.26(d)

About the Author

Holger W. Henke is assistant professor of political science at Metropolitan College of New York and editor of Crossing Over: Comparing Recent Migration in the United States and Europe (Lexington 2005). Karl-Heinz Magister is a researcher at the Center for Literary Studies in Berlin.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Foreword
Chapter 2 Acknowledgment
Chapter 3 Introduction: Constructing Vernacular Culture in the Trans-Caribbean
Part 4 Part I. (Re-)Creating Homes in the Vernacular
Chapter 5 Chapter 1. Premigration Legacies and Transnational Identities: Afro-Surinamese and Indo-Surinamese in the Netherlands
Chapter 6 Chapter 2. The Many Voices of Caribbean Culture in New York City
Chapter 7 Chapter 3. Family Reunion Rituals of African-Caribbean Transnational Families: Instilling an Historical and Diasporic Consciousness
Part 8 Part II. Performing Identitites
Chapter 9 Chapter 4. Dancing Around Dancehall: Popular Music and Pentacostal Identity in Transnational Jamaica and Haiti
Chapter 10 Chapter 5. Rituals, Journeys, and Modernity: Spiritual Baptists in New York
Chapter 11 Chapter 6. Performing "Difference": Gossip in Olive Senior's Short Stories
Chapter 12 Chapter 7. "This is my vibes": Legitimizing Vernacular Expressions in Caribana
Part 13 Part III. Writing Self, Other and (Trans-)Nation in the Trans-Caribbean
Chapter 14 Chapter 8. Patrick Chamoiseau's Seascapes and the Trans-Caribbean Imaginary
Chapter 15 Chapter 9. "A Local Habitation and a Name": Travelers, Migrants, Nomads of "Caribbean New York" in Colin Channer'sWaiting in Vain
Chapter 16 Chapter 10. Playing Both Home and Away: National and Transnational Identities in the Work of Bruce St. John
Chapter 17 Chapter 11. The Amerindian Transnational Experience in Pauline Melville'sThe Ventriloquist's Tale
Chapter 18 Chapter 12. Readings from Aquí y Allá: Music, Commercialism, and the Latino-Caribbean Transnational Imaginary
Part 19 Part IV. The (Trans-)Nation (Dis-)Embodied
Chapter 20 Chapter 13. Like Sugar in Coffee: Third Wave Feminism and the Caribbean
Chapter 21 Chapter 14. Work That Body: Sexual Citizenship and Embodied Freedom
Chapter 22 Chapter 15. Caribbean Cyberculture: Towards an Understanding of Gender, Sexuality and Identity within the Digital Culture Matrix
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