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165 books match the query 'Caribbean Area' and 27 start with t

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Tales, Tunes, and Tassa Drums

Retention and Invention into Indo-Caribbean Music

Peter Manuel

University of Illinois Press, 2015

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Tempest In The Caribbean

Jonathan Goldberg

University of Minnesota Press, 2003

Places sexuality at the center of Caribbean responses to Shakespeare's play. Shakespeare's The Tempest has long been claimed by colonials and postcolonial thinkers alike as the dramatic work that most enables them to confront their entangled history, recognized as early modernity's most extensive engagement with the vexing issues of colonialism--race, dispossession, language, European displacement and occupation, disregard for native culture. Tempest in the Caribbean reads some of the "classic" anticolonial texts--by AimÃ© CÃ©saire, Roberto FernÃ¡ndez Retamar, George Lamming, and Frantz Fanon, for instance--through the lens of feminist and queer analysis exemplified by the theoretical essays of Sylvia Wynter and the work of Michelle Cliff. Extending the Tempest plot, Goldberg considers recent works by Caribbean authors and social theorists, among them Patricia Powell, Jamaica Kincaid, and Hilton Als. These rewritings, he suggests, and the lived conditions to which they testify, present alternatives to the masculinist and heterosexual bias of the legacy that has been derived from The Tempest. By placing gender and sexuality at the center of the debate about the uses of Shakespeare for anticolonial purposes, Goldberg's work points to new possibilities that might be articulated through the nexus of race and sexuality. Jonathan Goldberg is Sir William Osler Professor of English Literature at The Johns Hopkins University. His previous books include Shakespeare's Hand (2003), Desiring Women Writing (1997), Sodometries (1992), and, as editor, Reclaiming Sodom (1994) and Queering the Renaissance (1994).

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The Caribbean

A History of the Region and Its Peoples

Edited by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano

University of Chicago Press, 2011

Combining fertile soils, vital trade routes, and a coveted strategic location, the islands and surrounding continental lowlands of the Caribbean were one of Europe’s earliest and most desirable colonial frontiers. The region was colonized over the course of five centuries by a revolving cast of Spanish, Dutch, French, and English forces, who imported first African slaves and later Asian indentured laborers to help realize the economic promise of sugar, coffee, and tobacco. The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples offers an authoritative one-volume survey of this complex and fascinating region.

This groundbreaking work traces the Caribbean from its pre-Columbian state through European contact and colonialism to the rise of U.S. hegemony and the economic turbulence of the twenty-first century. The volume begins with a discussion of the region’s diverse geography and challenging ecology and features an in-depth look at the transatlantic slave trade, including slave culture, resistance, and ultimately emancipation. Later sections treat Caribbean nationalist movements for independence and struggles with dictatorship and socialism, along with intractable problems of poverty, economic stagnation, and migrancy.

Written by a distinguished group of contributors, The Caribbean is an accessible yet thorough introduction to the region’s tumultuous heritage which offers enough nuance to interest scholars across disciplines. In its breadth of coverage and depth of detail, it will be the definitive guide to the region for years to come.

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The Day Underneath the Day

C. Dale Young

Northwestern University Press, 2001

Winner of 2002 Norma Farber First Book Award Finalist

Gifted with a vivid and exact skill, C. Dale Young's writing resembles an intricate anatomy lesson. His powers of observation probe the small energies of the natural world. Again and again the ordinary details of life transform themselves under the delicate pressure of his words--the movement of birds' wings, the color and texture of tropical flowers, the study of the ocean waves, the "scalpel of light" cutting through the beginning of the day. The language of Young's poems evokes an ultimate sense of place through a gorgeous marriage of tone and diction that echoes James Merrill and Amy Clampitt. As he meticulously maps out human passions and emotions, he explores both the surfaces and depths of everything that he surveys. His confident and polished verse unfolds intricate layers of landscape, seeking the order that lies beneath the unruly patterns of our lives.

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The French Imperial Nation-State

Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars

Gary Wilder

University of Chicago Press, 2005

France experienced a period of crisis following World War I when the relationship between the nation and its colonies became a subject of public debate. The French Imperial Nation-State focuses on two intersecting movements that redefined imperial politics—colonial humanism led by administrative reformers in West Africa and the Paris-based Negritude project, comprising African and Caribbean elites.

Gary Wilder develops a sophisticated account of the contradictory character of colonial government and examines the cultural nationalism of Negritude as a multifaceted movement rooted in an alternative black public sphere. He argues that interwar France must be understood as an imperial nation-state—an integrated sociopolitical system that linked a parliamentary republic to an administrative empire. An interdisciplinary study of colonial modernity combining French history, colonial studies, and social theory, The French Imperial Nation-State will compel readers to revise conventional assumptions about the distinctions between republicanism and racism, metropolitan and colonial societies, and national and transnational processes.

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The Glasgow Sugar Aristocracy

Scotland and Caribbean Slavery, 1775–1838

Stephen Mullen

University of London Press, 2020

The first book to outline Scotland’s colonial past and Glasgow’s direct links with the slave trade through sugar plantations.

This important book assesses the size and nature of Caribbean slavery’s economic impact on British society. The Glasgow Sugar Aristocracy, a grouping of West India merchants and planters, became active before the emancipation of chattel slavery in the British West Indies in 1834. Many acquired nationally significant fortunes, and their investments percolated into the Scottish economy and wider society. At its core, the book traces the development of merchant capital and poses several interrelated questions during an era of rapid transformation, namely, what impact the private investments of West India merchants and colonial adventurers had on metropolitan society and the economy, as well as the wider effects of such commerce on industrial and agricultural development.

The book also examines the fortunes of temporary Scottish economic migrants who traveled to some of the wealthiest of the Caribbean islands, presenting the first large-scale survey of repatriated slavery fortunes via case studies of Scots in Jamaica, Grenada, and Trinidad before emancipation in 1834. It, therefore, takes a new approach to illuminate the world of individuals who acquired West Indian fortunes and ultimately explores, in an Atlantic frame, the interconnections between the colonies and metropole in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

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The Long Emancipation

Moving toward Black Freedom

Rinaldo Walcott

Duke University Press, 2021

In The Long Emancipation Rinaldo Walcott posits that Black people globally live in the time of emancipation and that emancipation is definitely not freedom. Taking examples from across the globe, he argues that wherever Black people have been emancipated from slavery and colonization, a potential freedom has been thwarted. Walcott names this condition the long emancipation—the ongoing interdiction of potential Black freedom and the continuation of the juridical and legislative status of Black nonbeing. Stating that Black people have yet to experience freedom, Walcott shows that being Black in the world is to exist in the time of emancipation in which Black people must constantly fashion alternate conceptions of freedom and reality through expressive culture. Given that Black unfreedom lies at the center of the making of the modern world, the attainment of freedom for Black people, Walcott contends, will transform the human experience worldwide. With The Long Emancipation, Walcott offers a new humanism that begins by acknowledging that present conceptions of what it means to be human do not currently include Black people.

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The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, Volume XI

The Caribbean Diaspora, 1910–1920

Marcus Garvey

Duke University Press, 2011

With Volume XI: The Caribbean Diaspora, 1910–1920, Duke University Press proudly assumes publication of the final volumes of The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers. This invaluable archival project documents the impact and spread of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the organization founded by Marcus Garvey in 1914 and led by him until his death in 1940. Volume XI is the first to focus on the Caribbean, where the UNIA was represented by more than 170 divisions and chapters. Revealing the connections between the major African-American mass movement of the interwar era and the struggle of the Caribbean people for independence, this volume includes the letters, speeches, and writings of Caribbean Garveyites and their opponents, as well as documents and speeches by Garvey, newspaper articles, colonial correspondence and memoranda, and government investigative records. Volume XI covers the period from 1911, when a controversy was ignited in Limon, Costa Rica, in response to a letter that Garvey sent to the Limon Times, until 1920, when workers on the Panama Canal undertook a strike sponsored in part by the UNIA. The primary documents are extensively annotated, and the volume includes twenty-two critical commentaries on the territories covered in the book, from the Bahamas to Guatemala, and Haiti to Brazil. A trove of scholarly resources, Volume XI: The Caribbean Diaspora, 1910–1920 illuminates another chapter in the history of one the world’s most important social movements.

Praise for the Previous Volumes:
“The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers will take its place among the most important records of the Afro-American experience. . . . ‘The Marcus Garvey Papers’ lays the groundwork for a long overdue reassessment of Marcus Garvey and the legacy of racial pride, nationalism and concern with Africa he bequeathed to today’s black community.”—Eric Foner, the New York Times Book Review

“Until the publication of The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, many of the documents necessary for a full assessment of Garvey’s thought or of his movement’s significance have not been easily accessible. Robert A. Hill and his staff . . . have gathered over 30,000 documents from libraries and other sources in many countries. . . . The Garvey papers will reshape our understanding of the history of black nationalism and perhaps increase our understanding of contemporary black politics.”—Clayborne Carson, the Nation

“Now is our chance, through these important volumes, to finally begin to come to terms with the significance of Garvey’s complex, fascinating career and the meaning of the movement he built.”—Lawrence W. Levine, the New Republic

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The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, Volume XII

The Caribbean Diaspora, 1920-1921

Marcus Garvey

Duke University Press, 2014

Volume XII of the Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers covers a period of twelve months, from the opening of the UNIA's historic first international convention in New York, in August 1920, to Marcus Garvey's return to the United States in July 1921 after an extended tour of Cuba, Jamaica, Panama, Costa Rica, and Belize. In many ways the 1920 convention marked the high-point of the Garvey movement in the United States, while Garvey's tour of the Caribbean, in the winter and spring of 1921, registered the greatest outpouring of popular support for the UNIA in its history. The period covered in the present volume was the moment of the movement's political apotheosis, as well as the moment when the finances of Garvey's Black Star Line went into free fall.

Volume XII highlights the centrality of the Caribbean people not only to the convention, but also to the movement. The reports to the convention discussed the range of social and economic conditions obtaining in the Caribbean, particularly their impact on racial conditions. The quality of the discussions and debates were impressive. Contained in these reports are some of the earliest and most clearly enunciated statements in defense of social and political freedom in the Caribbean. These documents form an underappreciated and still underutilized record of the political awakening of Caribbean people of African descent.

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The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, Volume XIII

The Caribbean Diaspora, 1921-1922, Volume 13

Marcus Garvey

Duke University Press, 2016

Volume XIII of The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers covers the twelve months between the UNIA's second international convention in New York in August 1921 and the third convention in August 1922. It was a particularly tumultuous time for Garvey and the UNIA: Garvey’s relationship with the UNIA's top leadership began to fracture, the U.S. federal government charged Garvey with mail fraud, and his Black Star Line operation suffered massive financial losses. This period also witnessed a marked shift in Garvey's rhetoric and stance, as he retreated from his previously radical anticolonial positions, sought to court European governments as well as the leadership of the Ku Klux Klan, and moved against his political rivals.

Despite these difficult and uncertain times, Garveyism expanded its reach throughout the Caribbean archipelago, which, as Volume XIII confirms, became the UNIA's de facto home in the early 1920s. The volume's numerous reports from the UNIA's Caribbean divisions and chapters describe what it was like for UNIA activists living and working under extremely repressive circumstances. The volume's major highlight covers the U.S. military's crackdown on the UNIA in the Dominican Republic, as documented in the correspondence between John Sydney de Bourg—whom Garvey had dispatched to monitor the situation—and U.S. and British government officials.

In addition to UNIA divisional reports and de Bourg's extensive correspondence, Volume XIII contains a wealth of newspaper articles, political tracts, official documents, and other sources that outline the complex responses to Garveyism throughout the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe, all the while documenting this watershed moment for Garvey and the UNIA.

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The Memoirs of Captain Hugh Crow

The Life and Times of a Slave Trade Captain

Edited by the Bodleian Library

Bodleian Library Publishing, 2007

Numerous documents attest to the horrific conditions endured by African slaves during the centuries of the Atlantic slave trade. Less well known is the perspective of those who wielded power during this dark time in human history. The Bodleian Library fills that gap here with the memoirs of a principal figure in the slave trade, Captain Hugh Crow.

The first-hand account of a man who commanded one of the last legal slave vessels to cross the Atlantic, Life and Times of a Slave Trade Captain offers a revealing if frequently troubling look into the psyche of a slave trader. His chronicle leaves nothing to the imagination, as he recounts the harsh routine of daily life on a slave vessel, where on average a fifth of the crew—let alone the human cargo—never survived the crossing. Crow portrays himself as an “enlightened” slaver, a claim he justifies through the link between his close attention to his “negroes” and his financial success, and the songs composed for him by the slaves. His account also includes commentary on the social propriety of the slave trade and notes about the conditions on West Indian and Caribbean plantations as well as on slave ships. John Pinfold’s illuminating introduction recounts the life of Hugh Crow and sets him in the rich historical context of eighteenth-century mercantilism and its battle with the abolitionist movement. An eye-opening read, Life and Times of a Slave Trade Captain reveals an often overlooked facet in the complicated history of transatlantic slavery.

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The Non-Independent Territories of the Caribbean and Pacific

Continuity or Change?

Edited by Peter Clegg and David Killingray

University of London Press, 2012

By the end of the 20th century the once great modern European empires had gone – well, almost! Today, scattered around the world, there are small territories, remnants of empire that for one reason and another have eschewed independence and retain links of various kinds with the former imperial power. This edited collection focuses primarily on those territories in the Caribbean and Pacific which retain these ties. The issues affecting them such as constitutional reform, the maintenance of good governance, economic development, and the risks of economic vulnerability are important concerns for all territories both independent and non-independent. However, the ways in which these issues are addressed are somewhat different in small sub-national jurisdictions because of the particular regimes in place and the tensions inherent between the territories and their respective metropoles. The book brings together academics, policy-makers, constitutional lawyers, and civil servants to provide an insight into the complexities, contradictions, challenges and opportunities that help to define the non-independent territories of the Caribbean and Pacific, and their long-standing but sometimes awkward ties with their metropolitan powers.

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The Other Windrush

Legacies of Indenture in Britain's Caribbean Empire

Maria del Pilar Kaladeen

Pluto Press, 2021

Between the arrival of the HMT Empire Windrush in 1948 and the passing of the 1971 Immigration Act, half a million people came to the UK from the Caribbean. In the aftermath of the 2018 Windrush Scandal, the story of the Windrush Generation is more widely known than ever. But is it the whole story? Through a series of biographical essays, poems and articles, The Other Windrush shines a light on the hidden history of a 'minority within a minority': Indian and Chinese Caribbean migrants - often the descendants of indentured labourers - who were the 'invisible passengers' of the Windrush generation. Both highlighting the diversity of their lives and cultural backgrounds, and delving into the largely forgotten history of the system of indenture in the British Caribbean, The Other Windrush makes a unique addition to the literature on migration and the British Empire.

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The Other Windrush

Legacies of Indenture in Britain's Caribbean Empire

Maria del Pilar Kaladeen

Pluto Press, 2021

'This illuminating, vivid volume is a fitting tribute to the experiences of migration' - Hanif Kureishi
Between the arrival of the HMT Empire Windrush in 1948 and the passing of the 1971 Immigration Act, half a million people came to the UK from the Caribbean. In the aftermath of the 2018 Windrush Scandal, the story of the Windrush Generation is more widely known than ever. But is it the whole story?

Through a series of biographical essays, poems and articles, The Other Windrush shines a light on the hidden history of a 'minority within a minority': Caribbean migrants of Indian and Chinese descent - often the descendants of indentured labourers - who were the 'invisible passengers' of the Windrush generation.

Both highlighting the diversity of their lives and cultural backgrounds, and delving into the largely forgotten history of the system of indenture in the British Caribbean, The Other Windrush makes a unique addition to the literature on migration and the British Empire.

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The Pleasures of Exile

George Lamming

University of Michigan Press, 1992

In The Pleasures of Exile, as in his other works, George Lamming embraces the intricate issues of colonization and decolonization with a canny combination of playfulness and seriousness, irony and commitment. “[It] is a reciprocal process,” Lamming observes, “to be a colonial is to be a man in a certain relation; and this relation is an example of exile.”

Through a series of interrelated essays, The Pleasures of Exile explores the cultural politics and relationships created in the crucible of colonization. Drawing on Shakespeare’s The Tempest and C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins, as well as his own fiction and poetry, Lamming deftly locates the reader in a specific intellectual and cultural domain while conjuring a rich and varied spectrum of physical, intellectual, psychological, and cultural responses to colonialism. “My subject,” he writes, “is the migration of the West Indian writer, as colonial and exile, from his native kingdom, once inhabited by Caliban, to the tempestuous island of Prospero’s and his language. This book is a report on one man’s way of seeing.”

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The Quiet Zone

Caribbean Expressive Cultures and the Feminist Aesthetics of Disturbance

Petal Kimberly Samuel

Rutgers University Press, 2026

A serene beach. The classroom of an elite private school. The still nights in an upscale residential neighborhood. An acclaimed poet with a quiet, dignified mode of address. The sonic etiquette and experience of quiet is integral to each of these scenes. The Quiet Zone examines what the emergence of quiet as an elite aesthetic, privilege, and entitlement means for minoritized people who are often narrated as loud, disruptive, and disturbing, sonically, visually, and otherwise. Taking the Caribbean and its diasporas as its key sites of study, the book explores what we can learn from efforts to transform the region into the quintessential site of quiet leisure, in part, through the enactment of regimes of sonic discipline and surveillance directed against its majority Black population. Analyzing the work of Afro-Caribbean artists that catalog and critique sonic surveillance, the book questions the ways that quiet gets produced both as a regulatory ideal of racial, gender, sexual, national, and civilizational belonging and as a universal object of desire

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The Repeating Island

The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective

Antonio Benitez-Rojo

Duke University Press, 1996

In this second edition of The Repeating Island, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, a master of the historical novel, short story, and critical essay, continues to confront the legacy and myths of colonialism. This co-winner of the 1993 MLA Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize has been expanded to include three entirely new chapters that add a Lacanian perspective and a view of the carnivalesque to an already brilliant interpretive study of Caribbean culture. As he did in the first edition, Benítez-Rojo redefines the Caribbean by drawing on history, economics, sociology, cultural anthropology, psychoanalysis, literary theory, and nonlinear mathematics. His point of departure is chaos theory, which holds that order and disorder are not the antithesis of each other in nature but function as mutually generative phenomena. Benítez-Rojo argues that within the apparent disorder of the Caribbean—the area’s discontinuous landmasses, its different colonial histories, ethnic groups, languages, traditions, and politics—there emerges an “island” of paradoxes that repeats itself and gives shape to an unexpected and complex sociocultural archipelago. Benítez-Rojo illustrates this unique form of identity with powerful readings of texts by Las Casas, Guillén, Carpentier, García Márquez, Walcott, Harris, Buitrago, and Rodríguez Juliá.

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The Social Life of Spirits

Edited by Ruy Blanes and Diana Espírito Santo

University of Chicago Press, 2013

Spirits can be haunters, informants, possessors, and transformers of the living, but more than anything anthropologists have understood them as representations of something else—symbols that articulate facets of human experience in much the same way works of art do. The Social Life of Spirits challenges this notion. By stripping symbolism from the way we think about the spirit world, the contributors of this book uncover a livelier, more diverse environment of entities—with their own histories, motivations, and social interactions—providing a new understanding of spirits not as symbols, but as agents.

The contributors tour the spiritual globe—the globe of nonthings—in essays on topics ranging from the Holy Ghost in southern Africa to spirits of the “people of the streets” in Rio de Janeiro to dragons and magic in Britain. Avoiding a reliance on religion and belief systems to explain the significance of spirits, they reimagine spirits in a rich network of social trajectories, ultimately arguing for a new ontological ground upon which to examine the intangible world and its interactions with the tangible one.

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The Struggle of Non-Sovereign Caribbean Territories

Neoliberalism since the French Antillean Uprisings of 2009

H. Adlai Murdoch

Rutgers University Press, 2021

The Struggle of Non-Sovereign Caribbean Territories is an essay collection made up of two sections; in the first, a group of anglophone and francophone scholars examines the roots, effects and implications of the major social upheaval that shook Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, and Réunion in February and March of 2009. They clearly demonstrate the critical role played by community activism, art and media to combat politico-economic policies that generate (un)employment, labor exploitation, and unattended health risks, all made secondary to the supremacy of profit. In the second section, additional scholars provide in-depth analyses of the ways in which an insistence on capital accumulation and centralization instantiated broad hierarchies of market-driven profit, capital accumulation, and economic exploitation upon a range of populations and territories in the wider non-sovereign and nominally sovereign Caribbean from Haiti to the Dutch Antilles to Puerto Rico, reinforcing the racialized patterns of socioeconomic exclusion and privatization long imposed by France on its former colonial territories.

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The Things That Fly in the Night

Female Vampires in Literature of the Circum-Caribbean and African Diaspora

Giselle Liza Anatol

Rutgers University Press, 2015

The Things That Fly in the Night explores images of vampirism in Caribbean and African diasporic folk traditions and in contemporary fiction. Giselle Liza Anatol focuses on the figure of the soucouyant, or Old Hag—an aged woman by day who sheds her skin during night’s darkest hours in order to fly about her community and suck the blood of her unwitting victims. In contrast to the glitz, glamour, and seductiveness of conventional depictions of the European vampire, the soucouyant triggers unease about old age and female power. Tracing relevant folklore through the English- and French-speaking Caribbean, the U.S. Deep South, and parts of West Africa, Anatol shows how tales of the nocturnal female bloodsuckers not only entertain and encourage obedience in pre-adolescent listeners, but also work to instill particular values about women’s “proper” place and behaviors in society at large.

Alongside traditional legends, Anatol considers the explosion of soucouyant and other vampire narratives among writers of Caribbean and African heritage who in the past twenty years have rejected the demonic image of the character and used her instead to urge for female mobility, racial and cultural empowerment, and anti colonial resistance. Texts include work by authors as diverse as Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, U.S. National Book Award winner Edwidge Danticat, and science fiction/fantasy writers Octavia Butler and Nalo Hopkinson.

This book is available as an audio book (https://www.abantuaudio.com/books/1197052/The-Things-That-Fly-in-the-Night ).

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To Have and Have Not

Edited by Bruce F. Kawin; Tino T. Balio, Series Editor

University of Wisconsin Press, 1980

The story of the making of To Have and Have Not (1944) is an exciting and complex one, ranging from the widely reported romance between its stars, Humphrey Bogart and the unknown nineteen-year old Lauren Bacall, to one of the more subtle developments in the wartime alliance between the United States and the Batista regime in Cuba. Bruce F. Kawin's substantial and informed introduction reflects this excitement while explaining the complexities, helping all film scholars, students, and buffs to gain a fuller appreciation of one of Hollywood's most memoriable melodramas.
This is a story also of a collaboration amoung four important writers: Ernest Hemingway, Howard Hawks, Jules Furthman, and William Faulkner.

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To Us, All Flowers Are Roses

POEMS

Lorna Goodison

University of Illinois Press, 1995

Writing in The Hudson Review,
        David Mason has characterized Lorna Goodison's work as a "revelation
        to me, much of it beautiful for its simple negotiation of the line between
        life and art."
      One of the most distinguished
        contemporary poets of the Caribbean, Goodison draws on both African and
        European inheritances in her finely crafted poems, which often carry a
        sense of language's healing power in the face of the pain of the past.
        She deals thematically with the struggle of Caribbean women and writes
        in a fashion that has developed from conversational to more ritualistic.
      From reviews of Goodison's
        earlier works:
      "The evocative power
        of Lorna Goodison's poetry derives its urgency and appeal from the heart-and-mind
        concerns she has for language, history, racial identity, and gender."
        Andrew Salkey -- World Literature Today
      "A marvelous poet, one
        to savor and to chant aloud."
        -- Pat Monaghan, Booklist

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Transatlantic Conversations

Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Encounters with Italy and the Atlantic World

Beth L. Lueck

University of New Hampshire Press, 2017

This unique interdisciplinary essay collection offers a fresh perspective on the active involvement of American women authors in the nineteenth-century transatlantic world. Internationally diverse contributors explore topics ranging from women's social and political mobility to their authorship and activism. While a number of essays focus on such well-known writers as Margaret Fuller, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, other, perhaps lesser-known authors are also included, such as E. D. E. N. Southworth, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Elizabeth Peabody, Jeannette Hart, and Laura Richards.

These essays show the spectrum of interests and activities in which nineteenth-century women were involved as they moved, geographically and metaphorically, toward gaining their independence and the right to control their lives. Traveling far and wide—to Italy, France, Great Britain, and the Bahamas—these writers came into contact with realities far different from their own. On topics ranging from homeopathy and literary endeavors to politics and revolution, they conversed with others, reaching and inspiring transnational audiences with their words and deeds, and creating a space for self-expression in the rapidly changing transatlantic world.

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Transatlantic Topographies

Islands, Highlands, Jungles

Ileana Rodriguez

University of Minnesota Press, 2004

Explores the construction of the Americas by and through European eyes

Transatlantic Topographies was first published in 2004. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Transatlantic Topographies studies the representation of American space during the initial confrontation between Europeans and Amerindians and during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Starting from topographical descriptions of land, islands, highlands, and jungles, Ileana Rodríguez shows how existing systems of knowledge broke down with the discovery of the Americas and had to be reinvented through the interpretation of signs, the accumulation of evidence, material exchange, and, finally, through the learning, teaching, and “kidnapping” of language. Proceeding from the period of exploration to the modern creation of a “twentieth-century frontier,” Rodríguez charts the path that led from island paradise to jungle chaos, from representations of natural beauty to the racialization of the islands. Drawing attention to cross-cultural miscommunication and the riddles of meaning and message it produces, Transatlantic Topographies develops a highly nuanced understanding of the evolving forces of imperialism as they gave way to postcolonialism and then to transnationalism—and newly re-inscribed notions of imperial economic practices.

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