Pathologies of Paradise: Caribbean Detours

by Supriya M. Nair

Overview

Pathologies of Paradise presents the rich complexity of anglophone Caribbean literature from pluralistic perspectives that contest the reduction of the region to Edenic or infernal stereotypes. But rather than reiterate the familiar critiques of these stereotypes, Supriya Nair draws on the trope of the detour to plumb the depths of anti-paradise discourse, showing how the Caribbean has survived its history of colonization and slavery. In her reading of authors such as Jamaica Kincaid, Michelle Cliff, V. S. Naipaul, Zadie Smith, Junot Díaz, and Pauline Melville, among others, she examines dominant symbols and events that shape the literature and history of postslavery and postcolonial societies: the garden and empire, individual and national trauma, murder and massacre, contagion and healing, grotesque humor and the carnivalesque. In ranging across multiple contexts, generations, and genres, the book maps a syncretic and flexible approach to Caribbean literature that demonstrates the supple literary cartographies of New World identities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813935195
Publisher:	University of Virginia Press
Publication date:	09/24/2013
Series:	New World Studies
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	248
File size:	905 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Supriya M. Nair, Professor of English at Tulane University, is the author of Caliban’s Curse: George Lamming and the Revisioning of History.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1 The Empire and the Garden: Exhuming Bones, Inscribing Genealogies 23

2 Toxic Domesticity, Curative Kinship: Individual and National Trauma in Domestic Fiction 49

3 "Disasters in the Sun": Crime and Carnival 77

4 Magic, Science, Fantasy, and Religion" 112

5 Medusa's Laugh: Carnivalesque Comedy and the Caribbean Grotesque 143

Epilogue 175

Notes 183

Bibliography 215

Index 229

Editorial Reviews

Supriya Nair’s adroit commentaries on key concepts of Caribbean literature will be compelling to readers within and beyond Caribbean studies. Her very readable book offers fresh and often startling readings of a diverse range of texts.

Vera M. Kutzinski

"Supriya Nair’s adroit commentaries on key concepts of Caribbean literature will be compelling to readers within and beyond Caribbean studies. Her very readable book offers fresh and often startling readings of a diverse range of texts. "—Vera M. Kutzinski,author of Sugar’s Secrets: Race and the Erotics of Cuban Nationalism and The Worlds of Langston Hughes: Modernism and Translation in the Americas, The Martha Rivers Ingram Professor of English, Vanderbilt University

From the Publisher