Description |
1 online resource (xi, 192 pages) |
Contents |
Introduction. The politics of sovereignty in postcolonial West Indian literary discourse -- "Who worked this evil, brought this distance between us?" : sex and sovereignty in Sylvia Wynter's 'The hills of Hebron' -- "What you say, Elsa?": postcolonial sovereignty and gendered self-actualization -- "No, my girl, try Bertha" : race, gender, nation, and criticism in 'Wide Sargasso Sea' and 'Lionheart gal' -- Beyond inclusion, beyond nation : queering twenty-first-century Caribbean literature |
Summary |
"Recognizing that in the contemporary postcolonial moment, national identity and cultural nationalism are no longer the primary modes of imagining sovereignty, Sheri-Marie Harrison argues that postcolonial critics must move beyond an identity-based orthodoxy as they examine problems of sovereignty. In Jamaica's Difficult Subjects: Negotiating Sovereignty in Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Criticism, Harrison describes what she calls "difficult steps"--Subjects that disrupt essentialized notions of identity as equivalent to sovereignty. She argues that these subjects function as a call for postcolonial critics to broaden their critical horizons beyond the usual questions of national identity and exclusion/inclusion. Harrison turns to Jamaican novels, creative nonfiction, and films from the 1960s to the present and demonstrates how they complicate standard notions of the relationship between national identity and sovereignty. She constructs a lineage between the difficult subjects in classic Caribbean texts like Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys and The Harder they Come by Perry Henzell and contemporary writing by Marlon James and Patricia Powell. What results is a sweeping new history of Caribbean literature and criticism that reconfigures how we understand both past and present writing. Jamaica's Difficult Subjects rethink how sovereignty is imagined, organized, and policed in the postcolonial Caribbean, opening new possibilities for reading multiple generations of Caribbean writing"--Back cover |
Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 181-188) and index |
Notes |
English |
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Print version record |
Subject |
Jamaican literature -- History and criticism
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Caribbean literature (English) -- History and criticism
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Sovereignty in literature.
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Postcolonialism in literature.
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National characteristics, Jamaican -- In literature
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Motion pictures -- Caribbean Area -- History
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Caribbean literature (English)
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Jamaican literature
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Motion pictures
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Postcolonialism in literature
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Sovereignty in literature
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Caribbean Area
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Genre/Form |
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
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Film criticism
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History
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Literary criticism
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Literary criticism.
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Film criticism.
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Critiques littéraires.
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Critiques cinématographiques.
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Form |
Electronic book
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ISBN |
9780814273173 |
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0814273173 |
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