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Jamaica's Difficult Subjects
Negotiating Sovereignty in Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Criticism
Sheri-Marie Harrison
The Ohio State University Press, 2014
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 subjects”—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 rethinks how sovereignty is imagined, organized, and policed in the postcolonial Caribbean, opening new possibilities for reading multiple generations of Caribbean writing.
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Jean Rhys at "World's End"
Novels of Colonial and Sexual Exile
By Mary Lou Emery
University of Texas Press, 1990

The Caribbean Islands have long been an uneasy meeting place among indigenous peoples, white European colonists, and black slave populations. Tense oppositions in Caribbean culture—colonial vs. native, white vs. black, male conqueror vs. female subject—supply powerful themes and spark complex narrative experiments in the fiction of Dominica-born novelist Jean Rhys. In this pathfinding study, Mary Lou Emery focuses on Rhys's handling of these oppositions, using a Caribbean cultural perspective to replace the mainly European aesthetic, moral, and psychological standards that have served to misread and sometimes devalue Rhys's writing.

Emery considers all five Rhys novels, beginning with Wide Sargasso Sea as the most explicitly Caribbean in its setting, in its participation in the culminating decades of a West Indian literary naissance, and most importantly, in its subversive transformation of European concepts of character. From a sociocultural perspective, she argues persuasively that the earlier novels—Voyage in the Dark, Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, and Good Morning, Midnight—should be read as emergent Caribbean fiction, written in tense dialogue with European modernism. Building on this thesis, she reveals how the apparent passivity, masochism, or silence of Rhys's female protagonists results from their doubly marginalized status as women and as subject peoples. Also, she explores how Rhys's women seek out alternative identities in dreamed of, magically realized, or chosen communities.

These discoveries offer important insights on literary modernism, Caribbean fiction, and the formation of female identity.

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José Clemente Orozco
An Autobiography
By José Clemente Orozco; Translated by Robert C. Stephenson; Introduction by John Palmer Leeper
University of Texas Press, 1962

The artistic eminence of José Clemente Orozco (1883–1949) is such that he has been called “the greatest painter the Americas have produced.” In his Autobiography he also attains literary distinction. He is a writer who recounts the history of his period from a personal point of view and yet scarcely mentions himself. He is an observer who writes about the history of his country and of his country’s art, yet makes his own character implicit in the narrative.

The character that emerges is charming. It is that of a man strong but retiring, sharply critical of what he disapproves yet generous in praise of what he admires, decided in his views but modest in his assumptions and given to understatement in describing his own activities, averse to war and political struggle yet eager for conflict of ideas, always dedicated to the welfare of humanity.

Through the details of day-by-day living, he presents the panorama of the Mexican Revolution and of events in other parts of the world to which he traveled. His is a personal story of the Revolution, giving his reactions (as those of any common man) to the barbarities of war: “Insolent leaders, inflamed with alcohol, taking whatever they wanted at pistol point. . . . By night in dark streets the sound of gunplay, followed by screams, blasphemies, and vile insults. Breaking windows, sharp blows, cries of pain, and shots again.”

Orozco’s ability, as a painter, to see the details and to sense the mood of a place is apparent in his word pictures of the places he visited: “After six in the evening Paris is an immense brothel.” “London was like the seat of a noble family which had been exceedingly rich but had lost its fortune.” “Old, old Montmartre [is] a moldering cadaver . . .”

Orozco also makes some penetrating observations on art itself. Although he emphasizes individuality and freedom from tradition in art, he abhors unschooled art, especially such extremes as primitive Impressionism and other groups that lack instruction in the general principles of art, in technique, in theory of color, in perspective. He says ironically of the artistically uneducated: “Blessed are the ignorant and the imbecile, for theirs is the supreme glory of art! Blessed are the idiots and the cretins, for masterpieces of painting shall issue from their hands!” Orozco believes in education, not only for the artists but for their public. Taste in art can come only through understanding of the purpose and the techniques of art—through knowledge. Without training, public taste “mostly likes sugar, honey, and candy. Diabetic art. The greater the amount of sugar, the greater the—commercial—success.”

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José Lezama Lima's Joyful Vision
A Study of Paradiso and Other Prose Works
By Gustavo Pellón
University of Texas Press, 1989

Cuba’s José Lezama Lima became the most controversial figure in the flowering of the Latin American novel with the 1966 publication of Paradiso. Hailed as a seminal writer of breathtaking originality by Julio Cortázar, Octavio Paz, and Mario Vargas Llosa, Lezama was also attacked by the Castro regime and others for his stylistic obscurity, erotic descriptions, and violation of literary norms. Indeed, his experimental fiction, written on the very boundaries of the novelistic genre, resists classification. José Lezama Lima’s Joyful Vision, a much-needed critical study of Paradiso, Oppiano Licario, and Lezama’s essays, is thus an exploration in reading, one that highlights and preserves the essential and persistent contradictions in Lezama’s theory and practice of literature.

Gustavo Pellón focuses his study on Lezama’s search for equilibrium, clarifying such oppositions in Lezama’s writings as the mystical quest for illumination through obscurity, the calculated cultivation of naïveté, the Proust-like fascination with yet ultimate condemnation of homosexuality, and a modernist (even postmodernist) narrative style that conveys a mystical (essentially medieval) worldview. Above all, Pellón shares his wonder at Lezama who, in an age of pessimism, maintained his joyful vision of art and existence.

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Journal of a Homecoming / Cahier d'un retour au pays natal
Aimé Césaire
Duke University Press, 2017
Originally published in 1939, Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal is a landmark of modern French poetry and a founding text of the Négritude movement. This bilingual edition features a new authoritative translation, revised introduction, and extensive commentary, making it a magisterial edition of Césaire’s surrealist masterpiece.
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Judicial Institutions in Nineteenth-Century Latin America
Edited by Eduardo Zimmermann
University of London Press, 1999

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Judicial Review in Mexico
A Study of the Amparo Suit
By Richard D. Baker
University of Texas Press, 1971

The amparo suit is a Mexican legal institution similar in its effects to such Anglo-American procedures as habeas corpus, error, and the various forms of injunctive relief. It has undergone a long evolution since it was incorporated into the Constitution of 1857. Today, its principal purpose is to protect private individuals in the enjoyment of the rights guaranteed by the first twenty-nine articles of the Constitution.

Mexico after its independence produced many constitutions. One of the earliest problems was to find an adequate means of defending the Constitution against ill-founded interpretations of its precepts. Like the United States, Mexico has developed a system of constitutional defense in which the judiciary is the supreme interpreter of what this document means. Unlike the United States Supreme Court, however, the Mexican Supreme Court has not been innovative in its decisions or contradicted the administration on major policy decisions. This difference must be attributed to the civil law system of Mexico as well as to the political climate.

The first part of Richard D. Baker’s book describes the historical background of amparo and other methods of constitutional defense in Mexico. The three men most closely associated with creating a judicial form of constitutional defense in Mexico were Manuel Crescencio Rejón, José Fernando Ramírez, and Mariano Otero. Their own writings indicate that the immediate source of amparo must be found in the American institution of judicial review that was transmitted to Mexicans through Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.

The second part is an exposition of the workings of the amparo suit in the twentieth century and the constitutional and statutory provisions affecting it. Since 1857, when it was incorporated into article 102 of the Constitution, the amparo suit has evolved into a highly complex institution performing three functions: the defense of the civil liberties enumerated in the first twenty-nine articles of the Constitution, the determination of the constitutionality of federal and state legislation, and cassation. The Supreme Court is primarily limited to defending civil liberties through the amparo suit; it remains less innovative and more restricted than the United States system of judicial review, especially in the effect of its judgments on political agencies.

Baker’s study is the first one in English dealing with this subject and is one of the most extensive in any language. It should be welcome as a valuable tool to all students of Mexican law, history, and political thought.

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Julia de Burgos
La creación de un ícono puertorriqueño
Vanessa Pérez-Rosario. Traducido por Isabel Zapata, en colaboración con la autora
University of Illinois Press, 2021
Durante más de cincuenta años, Julia de Burgos ha evocado sentimientos de identidad y unión entre puertorriqueños y latinxs en Estados Unidos. Vanessa Pérez-Rosario va más allá del enfoque trágico de otras biografías de Burgos para examinar la vida de la artista considerando el trasfondo de la cultura puertorriqueña y la compleja historia de la isla y la diáspora. Enfocándose en Burgos como escritora y activista, Pérez-Rosario profundiza en su desarrollo artístico, su experiencia como migrante, sus luchas contra el colonialismo y la injusticia social y sus contribuciones a la cultura literaria y visual latinoamericanas. Al mismo tiempo, desentraña las dinámicas culturales y políticas que operan en las revisiones y reinvenciones de Burgos que escritores y artistas latinxs contemporáneos en Nueva York llevan a cabo para imaginar nuevas posibilidades para sí mismos y sus comunidades.

Disponible por primera vez en español, Julia de Burgos cuenta la destacada historia de la poeta y activista puertorriqueña.

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