ABSTRACTS

Michael P. Bibler, University of Manchester

Set in the Gulf waters near Florida during the Mexican-American War, James Fenimore Cooper’s Jack Tier, or the Florida Reef (1848) explores the contours of U.S. national identity through the story of Jack Tier, a woman who is disguised as a man. The bulk of the action takes place on a civilian U.S. ship attempting to smuggle gunpowder to the Mexicans. Jack Tier is the wife of the ship’s traitorous captain whom he had abandoned on a deserted island several years in the past. S/he is passing as a man in order to confront the captain about his past crimes. But, amidst the territorial struggle between two nations, this cross-dressing also engages concerns about the identity of the United States as one nation within the Americas. I argue that the book is not interested in whether the nation is marked as masculine or feminine, but instead considers how national identity is created at the interface between gender, sexuality, and property. A key factor in the Mexican-American war was the expansion of U.S. territory and interests tied to the spread of slavery, particularly in Texas and potentially in parts of the Caribbean. And Jack’s return to the ship as a woman dressed as a man confronts readers with questions about the status of women as the "property" of their husbands.

The Florida Reef, which constitutes the main setting of the novel, is a geographical liminal zone between the southern United States, the Caribbean, and Mexico. The reef is also doubly liminal in that it counts as neither fully "land" nor "sea." Against this backdrop, Jack Tier’s liminality in terms of gender and sexuality becomes a vehicle through which Cooper asks his readers to consider the ideological and economic rationales behind the war, as well as the geographical shape of the nation. Through a reading of Jack’s cross-dressing, I will show how Cooper asks his readers to reconsider the role of human property in defining the shape and character of the nation as a whole.

In 1948, Cuban author Alejo Carpentier famously asked, in his prologue to El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of this World), "¿Pero qué es la historia de América toda sino una crónica de lo real maravilloso?" ("What is the history of all of America if not a chronicle of the marvelous real?") This total question, we could argue, has helped literary critics spawn literary maps of the Antillean region according to the logic of the magical, the marvelous, and the fantastic. In historical terms, what needs did such a name (and, in Carpentier’s own terms, such a "faith") fulfill in 1948?

As part of a continued reflection on the place of magical realism as a viable method of understanding Caribbean space, this paper will flash forward to a recent adaptation of this total question. In his 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Dominican-American author Junot Díaz asks, "Who more sci-fi than us [Antilleans]?" In a rhetorical move which I argue echoes Carpentier’s, Díaz displaces and replaces the concept of the marvelous real with a genre that has not often been associated with the underdeveloped spaces of the Caribbean, forcing us to question not only the magical-real tradition and canon, but also the interplay between a science fiction and a fiction of magic in literature of/about these spaces. Is this label a move forward, a way of inscribing these geographies into a (new) history of modernity? Are the differences and distinctions between these two genres too tenuous to prove transformative in our search for new methods of analysis? Does the alchemy of science and literature provide new avenues into Caribbean legibility? In methodological terms, is it a way of squaring arguments concerning Caribbean space and belonging with a more particularizing account of literary form?

Contemporary literature helps us to understand how borders, especially of race and ethnicity, have become part of our daily lives and thoughts. In this paper, we argue that a discourse-oriented approach may help us to better understand how contemporary novels play with the concept of boundary simultaneously at a structural, textual and pragmatic level.

Our paper starts with a brief discussion of the concept of "boundary" as seen through the eyes of Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau. Their works – together with those written by Edward W. Said and Homi K. Bhabha – have proved to be indispensable guides for everyone studying space in postcolonial literature. Nevertheless, when analysing boundaries and contact zones in contemporary literary texts, the concepts proposed by these astonishing thinkers are sometimes difficult to handle. Therefore, in our paper, we want to show how postmodern thinking can be fruitfully combined with the heritage of narratology and semiotics. We argue that "classic" (structuralist and poststructuralist) literary theory can be brought together with insights from postmodern and postcolonial theory, and propose an analytical grid that can be used to examine the interplay of boundaries and contact zones in Caribbean (and other postcolonial) literatures. In order to do this, we adopt a discourse oriented approach, and make use of Dominique Maingueneau’s concept of "scenography".

In the second part of our paper, we focus on the cities of Fort-de-France (Martinique) and Point-à-Pitre (Guadeoupe), as seen through the eyes of Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant and Gisèle Pineau. In our paper, we also refer to older works that are set in these two cities, in order to examine the interplay between literary history and literary geography. Finally, we will show how a discourse-oriented approach can enrich our understanding of space in French Caribbean literature.

Gordon Brotherston, University of Essex

From Zona tórrida to Tristes tropiques: the structuralist revision of the Roman paradigm and what it implies

East to west, the tropics in America extend for more than 70 degrees of longitude, a fifth or so (350 W-1060 W) of equatorial circumference. This reach includes more continuous landmass than the tropics in Asia or Africa, as well as the world’s largest river system, and an ice-capped cordillera that features the world’s highest mountain (when measured from the earth’s middle). Culturally, the tropical domain stretches from coasts once controlled by the Tupinamba in the southeast and the Taino in the northeast to the Atacama oases incorporated by the Inca in the southwest and the Chichimec outposts of Teotihuacan in the northwest. In the middle, the divide between Tariana and Tucano that came to separate Brazil from Colombia is marked by the Iuaretê falls in a tributary of the Amazon, the river that encircling Marajó issues into the sea exactly at the equator. The site of the continent’s oldest cities, before Columbus this domain conceptually informed its architecture, literature, and self-mapping to an unsuspected degree.

The legacy of sugar, its relationship to imperialism, capitalism, plantation slavery, environmental transformation, social formation, ethnoclass, language, and cultural production in the New World, is still evident today, even in places where smoke has long ceased to rise from the chimneys of sugar mills and refineries. As Antonio Benítez Rojo affirmed, colonial sugar plantations served as prototypes for the highly stratified Creole societies emerging along the Atlantic coast of the Americas and the Caribbean, the region Rex Nettleford called Plantation America. The episodic convergence of the discourse of sugar and the discourse of cultural and racial creolization examined by Vera Kutzinksi in Cuba also occurs in other parts of the American Tropics such as the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, as well as in Brazil and Martinique, underscoring the foundational place of sugar in the social, economic, political, and cultural life of the region.

This paper examines two literary sagas by the Brazilian regionalist writer José Lins do Rego and the contemporary Martinican créoliste author Raphaël Confiant. While on the surface these writers seem to emerge from diametrically opposed ideological positions (Lins do Rego was a member of the plantocracy, a protégé of Gilberto Freyre, and a government minister during the long period of military rule; Confiant is a French-educated university professor with ties to autonomist and environmentalist groups, and a cofounder of the créoliste literary group), both writers’ plantation sagas represent the literary dimension of a defensive form of historical revisionism that relies on repetition to create a sense of continuity with the past. The serialization of Lins do Rego’s "sugarcane cycle" and Confiant’s "sugarcane trilogy" makes these works particularly fertile terrain for delving into questions of repetition and cyclicality as they relate to literary production and the construction of national identity in the New World.

My paper examines Ourika, a novel written by Mme. de Duras (Claire Lechat de Kersaint, Duchess of Duras) and published in 1824. Duras was the daughter of a wealthy creole mother from Martinique, Claire d’Alesso, and of the Count de Kersaint. Her father was sent to the guillotine during the Terror, and Duras left France for Martinique in 1793, spending time on the way in Philadelphia. Later, she took refuge in London with other aristocratic French émigrés. Ourika tells the story of a Senegalese child who is rescued from slavers by a French aristocrat and taken to live in his household. There, she is made much of by her mistress, and leads a relatively pleasant life until she realises that because of her colour she can never marry her mistress’s grandson Charles. In despair she goes into a convent and dies there.

The novel is interesting on many levels. It is apparently based on a true story, later related in the Souvenirs de la maréchale-princess de Beauvau, and is unusual not only in that it is told from a female perspective, but also in that it reveals with its reference to the 1791 revolt in St.-Domingue the anxieties of the French elites regarding people of colour. The paper concludes with an examination of Duras’s portrayal of the internalised racism and consequent self-loathing of the unfortunate protagonist, Ourika.

"Chaque femme est un pays nouveau" ( Le Nègre et l’Amiral 118).

This presentation examines the rewriting of the old topos of the female body as a landscape in the poem "Sable Venus: An Ode" (1764) believed to be by the Rev. Isaac Teale and the novel Le Nègre et l’Amiral (1988) by Raphael Confiant. This comparative study allows us to question the ambiguous promotion of the black woman. Such an approach reminds us, as Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton point out, that the body is the first and the most intimate of the colonies. In the Caribbean, the mulatto woman has become not only a prominent object of desire, but also a cultural and political symbol of métissage or mestizaje. In such a context, extolling the sexuality of the beautiful dark-skinned woman, symbol of an African heritage often discarded, seems subversive. In addition, these two texts delineate the problematic literary geography, that is to say, the description and interaction of the diverse physical, and cultural features of the black female body. In their sexualized discourse, Teal and Confiant reveal how they conceptualize the Caribbean space (Jamaica and Martinique).

This discussion will focus on the mythology of the black woman’s sexuality and of her travels from Africa to the New World; this mythology was developed in western literary rewritings of the primitive Other from the 18^th- to the 20^th-century. Exploring the ménage-à-trois composed of the white man, the black woman and the black man reveals the power struggle expressing itself through colonizing and recolonizing the Caribbean island. We will examine how this eroticized black female body bears traces of its social, political and cultural codification as well as shows the ways in which the colonial encounter shaped both western and non-western literary imaginaries and notions of space in the Tropics.

How, "after" the Cold War (and "during" the transition from the geopolitical orders of Cold-War related Area Studies), would we define "the Americas"?

I will take my cue from a poem by Victor Montejo, of Guatemala:

Éstas son las cinco direcciones

según los astrónomos mayas:

El rojo amanecer del día (oriente),

el negro atardecer agónico (occidente),

El blanco del norte friolento

el poder amarillo en el sur

y en el centro del mundo

el verdeazul intenso

del trópico.

Hermoso, es, ver el mundo

con sus cinco direcciones

a través del prisma Maya

"Atlantic World Studies" and "Pacific Rim Studies" define the Easterly and Westerly directions of the Americas in ways that acknowledge the constitutive interrelationships of the Americas with the rest of the world. "American Studies" (or "North American Studies") and "Latin American Studies," while perhaps somewhat dated, often serve to lay out for us the Northerly and Southerly directions of the Americas. But how to conceive of the "avian light" at the "center of the world" in relation to the other directions? Do we focus on the intense blue-green of the tropics, as Montejo and the conference suggests? Or do we focus on the crossroads of the "center" with the other directions by taking up "Inter-American" or "Comparative American" studies as our motif? Or is the point that the "Maya prism" gives us a chance to see the world whole, perhaps even to "make it new" (New World Studies)? I see merit in each of these options, and I'm not sure what would be gained by insisting that our object of study, the Americas, is so stable that one orientation would suffice--but it is best to be clear about what is at stake in viewing the Americas one way rather than another.

In my paper, I will contend that the Martinican Aimé Césaire’s Une tempête (an anti-colonialist adaptation of The Tempest) epitomises translation as interpretation and creative revision. With striking fidelity to Shakespeare’s play, Césaire engages with the racial and class conflicts intrinsic to The Tempest and gives voice to the occluded colonized and oppressed. Une tempête also stands out as a translation through time (the era of Black civil rights and African liberation movements) and space (creatively and playfully refashioning Shakespearean references into a francophone Caribbean location).

With satire, eloquence and panache, the play charts an ongoing demystification and unravelling of a monoglot, colonialist Prospero (and of a canonized, colonial Bard). The resurrection and resistance of Caliban is founded upon African cultural resonances, not imposed western ideologies. Likening himself to Malcolm X, Caliban identifies his dispossession, the fate of the enslaved African diaspora, and casts off the slough of abjection as he reclaims and re-invents his cultural identity. It is he who is the supreme verbal artificer.

I will chart Une tempête’s impact upon the francophone world before recalling the challenge of translating the translator: my translation of the play was a critically acclaimed British première at the Gate Theatre, Notting Hill in 1998. Its staging marked both the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the French colonies and the 50th anniversary of the arrival of West Indian immigrants to Britain.

I will also examine La Tragédie du Roi Christophe which I will be translating in the coming months. The play focuses upon the aftermath of the successful revolutionary de-colonization of Haiti and then the descent into misrule by the former revolutionary leader Christophe. It attacks the aristocratic grandeur and shocking abuse of power by contemporary post-colonial dictators.

In both plays, I will analyse the significance of place (both geographical, natural and architectural). I will consider race, sex and gender and the geo-linguistic influence of a hierarchical French language and culture, the Enlightenment, and how all this is contested and negotiated by indigenous and Afro-Caribbean cultures.

Selwyn R. Cudjoe, Wellesley College

Tacarigua and the Cradling of the Caribbean Intellectual/Activist: The Case of Sylvester Williams, C.L.R. James and George Padmore

Tacarigua is both a ward and a village in the northeast of Trinidad and Tobago.  It consists of the villages of Arouca, Tacarigua, Tunapuna and St. Joseph.  This area has a radius of no more than six miles.  Yet this ward has produced some of the more interesting intellectuals/activists (such as Sylvester Williams, C.L.R. James, George Padmore, Lloyd Best) of the twentieth century.  This paper examines some of the circumstances, geographical and otherwise, that may account for the production of these intellectuals/activists.

Surekha Davies, Birbeck, University of London

The Brazilian Peoples in the European Cartographic Imagination: A Comparative Analysis of Portuguese, Norman, German and Dutch Representations on Illustrated Maps

From the 1490s, European travel narratives relating to the Americas circulated in print. They contained diverse, sometimes fantastic portrayals of indigenous inhabitants. In 1516, the cosmographer Martin Waldseemüller moved a description of Caribbean Island cannibalism into the Brazilian interior on his world map, adding a graphic illustration. Cannibal activities in Brazil became the most frequent sixteenth-century motif for representing Amerindians on European maps. Such maps conditioned travellers’ expectations; yet Jean de Léry, having encountered the Tupinambá of Brazil, complained that ‘those who make such maps are ignorant, and have never had knowledge of the things they set forth’.

This paper argues that the emergence of cannibalism as the dominant ethnographic motif for Brazil on maps was not an inevitable consequence of the mapmakers’ source texts, but the result of selective constructions. The popularity of the motif varied across centres of cartographic production, and needs to be explained with reference to local economic interests. While Portuguese, German and Dutch maps regularly portrayed cannibalism, Norman maps downplayed it to the extent that Pierre Desceliers’s map of 1550 contained no reference to it, despite containing information from a map and a travel account detailing Brazilian anthropophagy. I offer a case-study of the ways in which ethnographic knowledge was shaped by its circulation across genres, social groups and centres of production.

The broader significance of the European invention and occasional omissions of Brazilian cannibalism lies in showing how a wide variety of textual and visual genres needs to be considered as participating in the making of knowledge, and not simply in its circulation. In addition, it reveals that early modern readers of travel narratives did not merely consume European knowledge about non-Europeans, but, through their own published works, also helped to transform it.

Elizabeth DeLoughrey, UCLA

Heavy Waters, Metallic Seas

This paper examines the naturalizing discourse of the "peoples of the sea" (Benitez-Rojo), a rise in the literature of the transoceanic imaginary in which Caribbean "unity is submarine" (Brathwaite), and places this in relation to the inscription of 'heavy waters' and metallic seas. It turns to those maritime spaces defined by the steel-hulled ships of the US Coast Guard and the nuclear and munitions waste dumps in the Atlantic as represented in the work of Kamau Brathwaite and Andrew Salkey as means of understanding the ocean as a localized place as well as the relation between militarization and Atlantic modernity.

My paper is what I term a processual inter-American border studies, one confronting Lefebvre’s stricture that "Space … has always been political and strategic. If space has an air of neutrality and indifference with regard to its contents … it is precisely because it has been occupied and used, and has already been the focus of processes whose traces are not always evident’. Which is to say that space is ideologically constructed as borders and boundaries, sometimes materially expressed, sometimes not. Whilst much in sympathy with the analytic mode that results from taking account of this observation, I also want to ask where this leads, and rhetorically ask, does it not lead us towards Etienne Baibar’s contention that, in the condition of postmodernity, borders are everywhere – proliferating in our cities, on our televisions, on our computer monitor screens. Take the case of Guantánamo. What sort of borders proliferate around, in, and well beyond this camp? Upon what does it border? How are these borders expressed and what is their relation, say, to Cuba’s history, to Caribbean and Spanish-American history, but also to Iraq, the so-called Middle East and, of course, to the global? The enquiry-base topic, ‘Why Guantánamo’ suggests itself as leading on from border studies to inter-hemispheric considerations. Guantánamo, its siting in its intrahemispheric Caribbean network is itself relational, and yet can be related to its siting in an interhemispheric, Orientalist East-West and its siting in a global War on Terror. These borders of Guantánamo are all ideologically constructed in their networks, but this does not mean that each of these borders does not also exist. Thirdly, it is processual, which is to say that there is no ‘complete’ approach that can describe in full – as Danto argued as long ago as 1968 – as developing hindsights reveal aspects and effects what were not previously available for observation and analysis. My contention is that an American Studies should make clear how different networks bear upon the node under study, and that exclusivity of focus at the very least risks being exclusive in order to handle the messy comparativist issues that arise.

We all have a sense of place in the world based upon where we come from and where we think we are going. The poet E.A. Markham takes that sense of place and shows us that it is rather a sense of oneself and indeed the lack of place which are important; the notion that we are one and separate at the same time. My paper will attempt to discover how Markham reveals this by focussing on his poetry and discussing Markham’s own identity from experiences of growing up in Montserrat and growing old in Europe. By briefly comparing Markham to the British poet Philip Larkin, I hope to illuminate the sense of place further by the stark comparison of staunch Englishman and Caribbean traveller, yet showing how neither poet truly fit into their respective categories. I also hope to answer calls as to whether Markham steals voices which he should not be allowed to claim, how Markham deals with this, and why (and if) he distances himself from his homeland, Montserrat; an island now largely uninhabitable due to the 1995 eruptions of the Soufrière Hills volcano. Ultimately, I would like to show how Markham’s poetry has a place in the future, and ask whether it can survive on its own terms rather than being a part of ‘Caribbean poetry'.

Mark McWatt’s Suspended Sentences consists of eleven interlinked narratives, five of which chart a journey upriver through the Guyanese interior. Its structure therefore resembles Wilson Harris’s Guyana Quartet (1960-63), a sequence of four novels set on named and unnamed Guyanese rivers. The trope of the journey upriver in Guyanese writing can be traced back further to Sir Walter Ralegh’s The Discoverie of the Large and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana (1596). Through his intertextual dialogue with Harris’s work, McWatt contributes to what Cyril Dabydeen has described as an ‘always forming’ sense of place created through an ‘intertwining’ of textual and immediate experiences of Guyana. Furthermore, in Suspended Sentences McWatt self-consciously explores both the extent to which experiences of the interior have informed an ‘always forming’ Guyanese aesthetic, and the ways in which literary and visual texts have shaped, and continue to shape, Guyana’s natural and social landscapes.

My paper will present this repeated journey upriver as a means through which Guyana is reinvented with each generation of literary writers. As I will argue, McWatt enters Harris’s textual landscape in order to question his vision of ‘cross-cultural wholeness’. While for Harris the retracing of Ralegh’s journey may enable writers to fracture his one-track trajectory into a multitude of ‘far-flung journeys’ which exceed its limits, McWatt reveals how contemporary uses of the El Dorado myth can be as constrictive and damaging as Ralegh’s ‘narrow expedition’. Bearing in mind the enduring presence of the El Dorado legend not only in Caribbean literary and theoretical writing, but also within Guyana’s post-independence politics, I will compare Harris’s affirmation of its creative possibilities with McWatt’s anxiety that its re-articulation within politicised narratives of national identity, or as part of the rhetoric of the tourism industry, might suspend the development of a Guyanese cultural consciousness.

That the Caribbean disappears, that is, that Caribbeans can no longer live comfortably on the islands of their birth, is a significant half-truth reflected not only in the specificities of daily life but also in the economy of displacement and dependency that forms around a "new tropicalism" that reasserts colonial and, in many instances, plantation dynamics. At the same time, a less visible civil war -- unemployment, drugs, AIDS, domestic, gun, and police violence -- ravages communities located outside the gated compounds and playgrounds of the privileged local and a growing tourist and foreign-resident population. Yet the precariousness of social division also fosters new and provocative forms of cultural and aesthetic performance that reassess notions of "art as resistance."

November 2007 found Tito Kayak (Alberto de Jesús, an icon of Puerto Rican anti-imperial protest performance), his shoulder dislocated, scaling a construction boom above a contested tourist hotel site. He outlasted police and staged a stunning descent and escape by sea. His previous engagements of authority trace the performance of resistance during the past decade. He is one of the heroes of the grassroots movement that removed the US Navy from the island of Vieques after 60 years of occupation, misappropriation, bombardment, and ecological chaos. Yet that role contrasts sharply with skyrocketing property prices and tourist developments that make home buying and other basic comforts economically feasible for US and Canadian visitors but now well beyond the reach of most native viequenses.

Other examples explored include the annual processions of Santiago Apóstol in the Afro-Puerto Rican community of Loíza, plays that revive the image of the persecuted, imprisoned, and tortured nationalist revolutionary Pedro Albizu Campos, and similar performance works from Santo Domingo, St. Lucia, and the US Caribbean Diaspora.

Born in Martinique in 1750, Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint Méry was a member of the white Creole elite and the author of a monumental 'description' of the island of Hispaniola. Saint-Méry's two admirably detailed and highly influential Descriptions are the products of eighteen years of work during which he benefited from direct experience in the two colonies and had access to both local archives (private and public) and documents relative to the colonial administration to be found in Europe. An advocate for more economic and political autonomy for the colony, Saint-Méry actively participated in the French Revolution but he held moderate, pro-slavery and pro-monarchic views which obliged him to abandon the ranks of the Reformers and flee France in 1793. Saint-Méry then moved to Philadelphia where he opened a publishing house and a bookshop and where he published both his Descriptions in 1796 and 1797 respectively. I will investigate the different ways in which Saint Méry 'describes' the two parts of the island and will try to establish if the somewhat neutral word 'description' is indeed the right one to define Saint-Méry's landscaping of Hispaniola.

Nina Gerassi-Navarro, Tufts University

Tropical nature evokes a distinctive kind of geographical setting with its own characteristic flora and fauna. Its representation, however, has been varied, shaped by distinct perceptual frames and ideologies that in turn have produced an array of visual images and verbal accounts. During the early nineteenth century the study of nature was closely intertwined with science and religion. Alexander von Humboldt argued that the key to understanding the divinely ordered natural world was through careful observation. Text and image complimented each other. He encouraged scientists and artists to travel and observe nature, especially the Tropics, where the exuberance of nature exceeded what the European eye knew. In 1859, Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory produced a major change in the understanding and perception of the natural world, generating new lenses for observation. This paper focuses on how this shift influenced the scientific and artistic representations of the Tropics as evidenced in several narratives and artistic accounts, all linked to the figure of Swiss born Harvard scientist Louis Agassiz.

In 1865, Agassiz left for Brazil to collect fish specimens and disprove Darwin’s theory. Known as the Thayer expedition, Agassiz’s voyage was comprised of a small group of scientists and select students, among them, the young William James. Upon his arrival, Agassiz was joined by Brazilian naturalist and engineer, Major João Martins da Silva Coutinho, who served as the expedition’s guide.

In this paper I analyze Agassiz’s narrative A Journey in Brazil (1868), co-authored with his wife, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz; James’ diary and sketches, that provide a counter view to Agassiz’s portrayal; Martin Johnson Heade’s watercolors; and Major Coutinho’s drawings. Read together, these visual and verbal accounts highlight the effect cultural frameworks and the development of new scientific paradigms had on the powers of observation.

Classics of revisionist historiography published only three years apart, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction (1935) and C. L. R. James’s Black Jacobins (1938) court what Benedict Anderson call the "spectres of comparison" that overshadow their fields. The titles of both books point to the inescapable fact of comparison as their raison d’etre and signal their aim to produce a corrective historical narrative, writing explicitly from within an orthodox historiography—of Reconstruction’s "failure" and the Haitian Revolution dominated by the shadow of the French Revolution—that they rename as "black." Just a few years later, in the 1940s, Alejo Carpentier invented his "New World Mediterranean," another implicitly comparative formula that was key to his work on Haiti as a historical object, locating the Haitian Revolution in the context of pre-revolutionary Cuba and the legacy of slave revolt. The result in all three of these projects is an activist history written from the spatio-temporal vantage points of both the Old and New Worlds. The question they raise: as models of comparative studies by prominent New World/American intellectuals, how do they manage to both raise and exorcise the spectres of comparison?

My paper focuses on Black Jacobins and explores the strategies, conceptual, narrative and linguistic, that James uses to foreground the spatio-temporal relation that is fundamental to comparative thinking. He allows us to ask a deceptively simple question that has far-reaching answers for the multifarious uses of slave revolt in Du Bois, Carpentier and others. Where and when was the Haitian Revolution? The where introduces all those place names, in all those languages, only the Spanish San Domingo, French Saint Domingue and the indigenous "Haiti," but also all the other terms for the region as a whole, including the West Indies, Greater or CircumCaribbean and, of course, New World Mediterranean. The when brings in the different timelines of the "Haitian Revolution," some starting as early as the 1750s with the slave revolt of Boukman, others with the 1789 fall of the Bastille, others with the 1791 mass slave uprising led by Toussaint, and ending in 1803 with the death of Toussaint and the defeat of Napoleon’s forces, or 1804 with the establishment of Haiti by Dessalines. So the space of the Black Jacobins is notably transnational and multilingual while their time is, if anything, even more multidimensional. The "text" of The Black Jacobins mirrors this traveling history in that it’s both a single celebrated work by James, a textual cluster of different editions, prefaces and appendices, a play and set of lectures, as well as a wider circle, a text-network that takes in Du Bois and Carpentier, for starters. I will conclude by following the lead of what could loosely be called the adaptations of this text, starting with the comparativism of the Haitian Revolution as itself an adaptation of the French Revolution, moving to all the "outsides" of The Black Jacobins, textual and contextual, including editions and translations, and ending with the uses of adaptation for comparative studies.

It has become a commonplace to say that Caribbean writers write from a problematic locus of enunciation. However, most literary texts are still studied as separate from the context in which they have emerged, specifically from the place (or non-place) in which these authors are situated. In order to transcend this dualism, we will focus on Maingeneau´s theory of the writers´ paratopic condition which he defines as a space of negotiation between writer and place. In this paper I will focus on the recent novelistic work produced by three writers: Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá (Puerto Rico), Patrick Chamoiseau (Martinique) and Frank Martinus Arion (Curaçao) and briefly analyze the ways in which their work reflects (or rejects) contemporary theories of the non-place (Augé, Derrida) and challenges a geographical definition of the `American Tropics´ in favour of one based on a common historical experience of diaspora and current conditions of light colonialism.

From canonical modernist novels such as Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo and Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, to popular travel narratives such as Peter Fleming’s Brazilian Adventures and H.M. Tomlinson’s The Sea and the Jungle, the early twentieth century witnessed a proliferation of texts narrating transatlantic and riverine journeys from England to South America. Within South America, I argue the expansive network of rivers and complex geography of the Amazon region provided British writers with an imaginative terrain to map the physical and psychological affects of modernization, industrialization and capitalism. This ambiguous colonial periphery also influenced the formal innovations of these writers, inspiring an aesthetics of disorientation, fragmentation, and non-linear chronologies. Drawing on the history of literary and scientific texts linking the Thames to the Amazon, this paper investigates the significance of the Amazon region in the aesthetic innovations and imperial critiques in Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out. For Woolf, the greatest source of inspiration for Elizabethan writers – and the development of English literature at large – was the blossoming of British maritime exploration and the proliferation of discovery narratives, particularly the collection of Richard Hakluyt (Principle Navigations, 1589). "The world of Shakespeare is the world of Hakluyt and of Ralegh," she writes. I argue that it is through the invocation of Ralegh and other discovery narratives, alongside textual engagements with the indecipherable geography of the Amazon, that Virginia Woolf makes her initial interventions in the novel form. Linking gender, Empire and capital within a discourse of travel, Woolf formulates an aesthetics of fluidity and movement which mirror the landscape, and in which the oppressive forces of imperialism, capitalism and marriage result in stasis and death. I argue that this turn to the Amazon region as a geographic and textual site markedly influenced the development of British modernist aesthetics, including the writings of Virginia Woolf.

This paper will explore travel writing about Saint Lucia. Most of the travel accounts that feature the island were written in the nineteenth and twentieth century, with the exception of a few earlier accounts: An Houre Glasse of Indian Newes, which was published in 1607, offers the first lengthy account of European settlement on the island before Thomas Warner’s full scale attempt in Saint Kitts in January 1624. A history of the voyages and travels of Capt. Nathaniel Uring was published over a century later. His reports concentrate mainly on the British-French rivalry over the possession of the island; something that resonates strongly in Saint Lucia today as most of the inhabitants speak English as well as French Creole. Both of these texts have received little academic attention even though they provide insight into the nature of Saint Lucia in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. This paper will consider the two accounts at great length alongside ideas relating to Space and Place: in particular, aspects of geography, agricultural practices, and historical sites on the island.

This paper examines how "tropicality" and "fevers" are configured in two of Leslie Marmon Silko’s novels, Almanac of the Dead (1991) and Gardens in the Dunes (1999). The actual physical "fevers" that I deal with are the epidemics of "feverish diseases" brought up by European conquest and colonization: flu, small pox, pneumonia, tuberculosis, and the like. When Columbus first discovered the Americas, all these disease were indeed a most prominent feature of the Columbian exchange, which resulted in the collapse of the Native American Empires as well as the death of millions of Indians. Significantly, the lands invoked images of the tropics for the colonial invaders. Calling this part of the globe "the tropics" was in effect a Western way of defining the landscape that was culturally alien, as well as environmentally distinctive, from Europe of the temperate zone. Unfortunately, as Europeans invented the tropicality of the Americas, they did not turn them into tropical Edens, as they presumed they would. The Americas became the "diseased" lands, the tropical Inferno. Environmental hotness was transformed into bodily heat of Native American sickness.

The hotness is not a mere colonial invention, however, as we consider Silko’s novels. The fever of the body is in effect complicated by and resonant with the poignant drought of the land. As fever becomes an appropriate metaphor for Silko to disclose the bitterness and poignancy of Native American traumatic history, the spiritual and historical trauma of Native American holocaust and genocide is to be represented in various forms of bodily fevers and land drought. As the indigenous reclaim the diseased and corrupted land, I also delve into how Native Americans make herbs and ceremonies the sources of their healing. Tribal medicine provides a refuge from "fever" while Western medicine becomes the patient. The "tropical diseases" regenerate the tribal healing that is otherwise consigned into oblivion by colonial White medicine. Using Foucault’s investigation of "fevers" in Western medical history as the critical backbone, I argue that, as understood to mean a finalized reaction of the organism defending itself against a pathogenic attack, the fever that appears in the course of the disease goes in the opposite direction. It is a sign not of the disease, but of the resistance to the disease. It has, therefore, a salutary value: fever is an excretory movement, purificatory in intention as its etymology shows—februare is to expel the shades of the dead ritually from a house (Foucault The Birth of the Clinic: An Anthropology of Medical Perception). Therefore, far from being pure physiological signs that should be mechanically investigated under the Western medical gaze, fevers contain significant historical and cultural meanings. Fevers are the "working through" as well as the "acting out" of Native American psychological, spiritual, and historical trauma, the externalization of the interior "inflammations."

As US sugar companies expanded their interests in eastern Cuba during the 1930s, they came into conflict with Cuban peasants who had farmed there for many years and regarded the land as theirs. One peasant community called Realengo 18 in the mountains just outside Guantánamo resisted all attempts to displace it and gained such a reputation for its obstinacy that a left-wing journalist was sent from New York to report on the conflict.

Josephine Herbst wrote for the Marxist journal, The New Masses, but she was also a novelist of some significance, who since the 1920s had been using an innovative combination of realism and modernism to tell the story of a generation of US communists, socialists, and trade unionists. In late 1934 Herbst’s literary and journalistic reputation was at its peak, with her novel The Executioner Waits just published to great acclaim: William Carlos Williams said it was the best novel he’d read in years, while another critic said she was one of the few major novelists working in America.

After several weeks living in Havana, a city in the midst of huge strife, Herbst finally travelled to Santiago where the political underground, eventually convinced of her goodwill, arranged for her to visit Realengo 18, where she spent five of what she always considered the most important days of her life. The dispatches she sent back to The New Masses caused a sensation in the USA, but she also wove her Cuban experience into the culminating volume of an autobiographical trilogy of novels.

Despite intermittent interest from feminist scholars and students of the 1930s, Herbst has never been accorded a significant position within the history of US literature, now rarely meriting even a passing mention, but she forms a significant link in the long chain of writers who have travelled south into the American Tropics to bring back news of political experiments that might—or might not—resonate with events in the USA.

This paper attempts to analyse Herbst’s journalistic and fictional accounts of Realengo 18, to put them into their broader Cuban context, and to reflect on the relationship between US writers and this part of the American Tropics during the 1930s.

Flora and fauna are significant and complex tropes in the literature of the American tropics. Natural histories and botanical writing, such as those of Hans Sloane, were complicit with European dominion over the Caribbean region. The landscape itself is a reflection of plantation history: indigenous plants grow next to profitable Indian sugar cane and East African coffee; whilst other West African fruits and vegetables were cultivated in the slaves’ provision grounds. When trying to explain his theories of Antillanité, Glissant reached for a botanical metaphor: the rhizome. When black Caribbean writers address their environment they navigate dangerous ideological territory: placing the body alongside the natural world risks complicity with primitivising discourses; erasing the body may "dispossess" Afro-Caribbeans from their own country.

Drawing on Wilson Harris’ essay ‘The Amerindian Legacy’, I seek to show how Derek Walcott utilises the Arawak/Taino tradition of the zemi in order to approach the Caribbean environment from a perspective outside of colonial or post-colonial complications. As Harris demonstrates, the zemi (spirit icon) is also etymologically linked to the word "space". With a reading of the poem ‘Koenig of the River’ (1977), in which a sole European explorer travels up a jungle river, I show how Walcott opens up these iconic "spaces" to people of any race or culture. Ways of knowing, or experiencing, the landscape forge Caribbean "identities" over racial ancestries.

Joanna Johnson, University of Miami

The English landscape tradition has tended, until recently, "to view ‘England’ as a unit whose nature is essential and unquestioned." But nature is far from essential and far from passive: Raymond Williams describes nature as "probably the most complex word in the English language," while W.J.T. Mitchell suggests "we approach landscape as a verb rather than a noun, a process by which social and subjective identities are formed, considering not just what landscape ‘is’ or ‘means’ but what it does, how it works as a cultural practice." In other words, there is nothing "natural" about "nature."

V. S. Naipaul’s narrator says in The Enigma of Arrival that "land is not land alone, something that simply is itself. Land partakes of what we breathe into it, is touched by our moods and memories." This paper will examine the "moods and memories" that the Caribbean writers V. S. Naipaul and Jean Rhys "breathe into" England’s rural landscape. Do ideas of tropicality emerge in their descriptions of England’s green and pleasant land? If, as David Dabydeen observes of the writer in the Caribbean, the "master script is in English, and the colonial writer is shackled to it, perceiving and describing his tropical, equatorial landscape in English romantic images—of vales and meadows, rills and purling streams," then how far is the opposite effect also true? That is to say, to what extent do accounts of the English landscape by authors who were raised in the Caribbean evince tropical and equatorial images and aesthetics? Questioning the assumption that there is one single way of understanding the landscape, this paper will examine how far ideas of tropicality extend beyond the physical and geographical boundaries of the Caribbean, and re-surface several thousand miles away in literary descriptions of the "natural," in the English countryside.

In our paper we propose to explore the British Caribbean writers Caryl Phillips's (Cambridge) and David Dabydeen’s (The Counting House) investigations into experiences of belongingness and rootedness in the context of Caribbean colonialism. We are interested in examining the writers’ discussion of changing levels of belongingness through new experiences of place in the texts as the characters encounter the West Indies. Both novels, which investigate experiences of dislocation, are particularly interesting in terms of how they ventriloquise the literary production of the colonies as it is captured in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary discourses in order to unravel past representations of the colonies. By moving their female protagonists across geographical and ideological borders and by locating them in gendered, class-related, and race-specific spaces in migration, Cambridge and The Counting House explore the negotiation and reconciliation of identities generated by cross-cultural encounter.

The writers employ conventions and attitudes typical of literature of the time to create voices that are initially firmly situated within an outsider’s stance. However as the novels progress these paradigms are challenged and new readings of perception and history are presented. In Cambridge, Phillips draws on the conventions of diaries written by Victorian travellers to re-create this discourse, yet lays bare its dysfunctions by deviating from these patterns in subtle but telling ways as the novel progresses. Similarly, colonial discourse and the writing of history are brought into play in The Counting House as Dabydeen takes the form of a narrative and creates an allegorical bond between the plantation and the British Empire, focusing readerly attention on the place of the colonial endeavour within the very core of British history and society. In examining these texts we consider the novels’ explorations of the changing senses of belonging and not belonging to both the land left behind and the new homes in the West Indies. Furthermore, we pay particular regard to how sense of place relates to the questions of belongingness and in-betweenness in colonising societies.

Environments engage the languages of locality in subconscious ways. Or vice versa. In postcolonial geographies, lands—whether colonially deprived, neo-colonially exploited, or post-colonially re-membered—bear the unutterable traumas from history, from "ecological imperialism," and even from globalization. For writers of and about the New World, images of the land profoundly affect their re-/configuration of identities. For some, re-imagining landscapes of distant native lands unsettle their anxieties as rootless exiles, while horticultural landscapes reproduced in their diasporic gardens subconsciously reveal their topographical perceptions as culturally and nostalgically relocated. On the other hand, globalization and neocolonial industrialization have cast transforming forces on the environments of the New World, perplexing local geographies with Western models of urban civilization, "imagined communities" of "city-states" with multicultural creolization of transnationalism.

Drawing from my readings of Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest and Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven, I intend to parallel and compare their distinctive environmental anxieties through representations of which either neocolonial globalization or postcolonial identify is ecologically phrased. I propose that in these two novels, both writers engage in environmental issues to claim individuals' resistance to power as well as their anxieties in identifying their diasporic selves.  Whereas Yamashita's novel is a more dystopian reflection of transnational mobility as a result of globalized capitalism, No Telephone to Heaven deals politically with current condition of Jamaica: large emigrant local populations, neocolonial manipulations and "the return of the repressed."  And I argue that, through the heroine's observations on Jamaica and her obsession with "the land," there lie within such ecological remembering of the landscape constructions of a postcolonial locality rendered possible by the speech of nature.

This paper will explore the interconnections between the institutionalization of new academic disciplines like anthropology, archaeology, geography, and history in the US in the mid-nineteenth century and the scientific, and amateur, exploration of Mesoamerica by citizens of the US and other countries. In the texts emerging from these expeditions, such as the writings of John Lloyd Stephens, Ephraim Squier, Arthur Morelet, Benjamin Moore Norman, and Georg Scherzer, Mesoamerica, and in particular Yucatan, is produced as a polytropic and multinational contact zone - a site of straightforward geopolitical interest in the case of the United States but also of a lingering Romantic cosmopolitanism in the Humboldtian vein or as a possible haven for refugees from post-1848 Europe.

While Kirsten Gruesz has recently (in ALH) argued in favour of reconceptualizing the Gulf of Mexico as a multicultural contact zone, the writings of Stephens (his two travelogues on Central America published in the 1840s) have likewise received renewed attention. Formerly viewed as either accounts of post-heroic adventures in the jungles of Yucatan and Guatemala or as reliable scientific descriptions of Maya antiquities, his travelogues are now analyzed (e.g. by Tripp Evans and Bruce Harvey) as generically hybrid documents whose polyvocality is at least in part the result of Stephens's different functions as official diplomatic envoy, as private adventurer and pioneer tourist, and as amateur scientist introducing the embryonic disciplines of American archaeology, ethnology, and geology to their "natural" terrain. The paper offered here is most concerned with this polyvocality and polytropicality. Though predominantly preoccupied with the implication of Yucatan and surrounding areas in a continentalist US-American rhetoric that switches back and forth between different generic and discursive registers (from diplomacy to history to an early form of ethnography), the paper also seeks to address contemporary views of the region that escape this discursive regime. In looking at the writings on Yucatan from a transnational and multilingual perspective, the paper wants to sketch how the scientific discourse on Mesoamerican antiquities emerges within a much more complex semantic field than is often assumed. The mid-nineteenth century discourse on Maya antiquities, though strongly subservient to the interests of empire in the US-American texts, cannot be reduced to this function. Next to domestic subversions of that discourse (in the form of parody and satire) an investigation of non-US texts shows up alternative imaginary narratives and trajectories.

At the southern edge of the Caribbean and perhaps beyond it, French Guiana has a unique past (the peripheral relation to empire) and present (the overwhelming fact of immigration from outside). The territory illustrates and performs in a particularly dramatic way the tension between, on the one hand, collective cultural identity affirmation and, on the other, its movement or dispersal, as well as that between assimilation and difference. In Cayenne, a triad of French Atlantic forces ceaselessly complicates the ground of identity production: metropolitan assimilationism; immigration; and the Creole historical legacy. However, debates in French Caribbean cultural theory tell us that it is the fate of ‘Creole’ to embody in itself that tension between identity and its dispersal. Coupled with sexual-political tensions that are intensely lived, these processes mean that the culture of Cayenne has nonetheless the potential to navigate through minor, Atlantic ways of being that emphasise a Guyane to come (and to imagine) rather than the legacies, dark or creative, of its history. The focus in this paper is on one element in the Cayenne carnival, namely the famous bal paré-masqué of the Touloulous, where masked women, in a disguise that covers them from head to foot, on this occasion take the initiative to invite men (not disguised) to dance.

The paper thus combines an emphasis on both place and interconnection, and provides an opportunity, via the case of Cayenne, to debate the relationship between the theme of ‘American Tropics’ and that of a ‘French Atlantic’: to speak, in other words, simultaneously of the specificity of the cultural and historical experience of the French-speaking zones, and of the general problematic of ‘Atlantic Studies’ itself as it relates both to those French experiences and to the notion of the ‘tropics’.

Laura Martin, University of California, Santa Cruz

The Strange Career of “A Once Lamented Pair”: “Racial” Disorientation and Barbadian Persistence in the Inkle and Yarico Legend

In the preface to the first dramatic adaptation of the Inkle and Yarico legend, Incle and Yarico, a Tragedy of Three Acts (1742), a “friend” of its frequently disputed author, “Mrs. Weddell,” defends the play’s Africanization of the once Amerindian Yarico by describing Yarico’s complexional difference from “the European Hue” as a “casual Tincture of the skin.”  Also an uncanny encapsulation of the general adaptation history of Inkle and Yarico, this language of “casual Tincture” specifically speaks to the long century of the tale’s English trajectory in which Yarico begins an “Indian maid” in Richard Ligon’s 1657 A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes and ends “a black-a-moor” in the legend’s last popular rendition, George Coleman’s 1787 Inkle and Yarico: An Opera.  This aleatory discourse, furthermore, summons the curious and often critically ineffable interludes in which Yarico is featured as both Amerindian and African within a single work, the most notable being Frances Seymour’s simultaneous description of Yarico as “negroe virgin” and “Indian maid” in her poem “The Story of Inkle and Yarico.” 

Taking up the problem of Yarico’s “racial” disorientation, a quandary that has been described as both literary “charm” and symptom of English “racial” ignorance, my paper argues that such “racial” confusion is a commonplace, foundational element of 17^th- and 18^th-century English literature and culture, one directly imbricated with New World colonization.  It points to how critics that either fetishize or render symptomatic the “racial” disorientation of the legend often project later, 19^th-century notions of race onto the tale and miss its chief contributions to the understanding of racial thinking:  that “race” as a fixed category is a modern concept and belies a “strange career” of uneven development; that “race” as a non-state imposed discursive category, as was the case in England, unveils significant particularities in the circuitous course of English empire — the anomalous character of England’s hybrid colonial labor force, the intimacy of the making of race and the development of New World slavery.  In this vein, my paper attempts to contextualize the “racial” disorientation characteristic of Inkle and Yarico with analogous accounts in 17^th-and 18^th-century literature, natural history, scientific discourses, and travel narratives, with this question as its driving force:  how do we account for the persistence of Barbados as a tragic endpoint in a tale largely characterized by “casual” disorientation?  Although the setting of Inkle and Yarico occasionally strays from the island, how do we reconcile its incongruous story of racial formation with the general resoluteness of place in the tale?

In early twentieth-century Brazil, capital earned through coffee export brought the modernization sought by many urban intellectuals. While much attention was devoted to the urban consequences by Brazilian modernists, in particular the booming cultural life of the city of São Paulo, less emphasis was given to the depiction of its landscapes. Unlike Central America, where limitations of good land forced cultivators to take better care of the soil, in Brazil the transience of coffee crops left a devastated hollow frontier in its wake. While coffee production demanded more and more ‘virgin’ land, it also required a constant influx of immigrant labour in the wake of the abolition of slavery. By focusing on a selected visual archive of images of coffee production during a transformative period of Brazilian history (including film and photography), this paper aims to shed light on the ambiguities of the modernizing process.

This paper explores the geographical imaginings and attempts to found a variety of micro-nations in the Caribbean Sea. Beginning with the traditional link between islands and literary utopias, I examine the link in literary geography between the island, the Sargasso and the longstanding fantasy of locating and assembling the new world in the Caribbean. The paper compares textual with material creations, emphasizing the role of narrative in attempts to make places out of in-between spaces, the lacunae at the heart of the American Tropics.

Central to the writing of the Cuban author, Reinaldo Arenas, is his homeland, Cuba. In the literary and autobiographical writings of Arenas identity is structurally dependent upon the place of Cuba, a place without which his literary personas would be unable to exist and through identification with they seek authenticity. This dependence upon place is complicated by the author’s exile as part of the Mariel boatlift of 1980 which leads to a profound sense of loss and separation. However, Arenas’ position as ‘exile’ always already preceded his actual physical exile to the USA; the Cuba he yearns for has always been already experienced as a loss, as in the literary world of Arenas Cuba is an imaginary place of origins, a place that has never existed and as such to which he can never return. The loss that is so much a part of his writing can thus be seen as less the loss of an actual geographical place—the nation—and more a deep structural loss on a primal level. The separation he feels is thus not merely spatial but psychological. This paper engages with some of the extraordinary intersections created between Arenas’ writing, Cuba, and exile and examines the always absent place of Cuba in the fictional and autobiographical world of Arenas.

As Edward Said writes in Culture and Imperialism (1994), "everything about human history is rooted in the earth." Similarly, human identity has always been determined by its geographical surroundings. The life conditions in the American Tropics have certainly been influenced by local history and the environment; colonization, dislocation, slavery and imperialism have all contributed to shaping the Caribbean psyche, which can be characterized by a focus on the individual in relation to others and to nature. This is particularly obvious in the way space is perceived and represented in the literature from the New World tropics.

My intention in this paper is to compare the way in which Dionne Brand and Althea Prince, two West Indian writers living in Canada, use the landscape of their native Caribbean in their writing to trace the evolution of their characters, fictional or not, in relation to their spatial surroundings. The various spaces in which the protagonists evolve – insular, pelagic but also urban – relate in significant ways to their self-construction.

In At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999), Brand describes the life experiences of a whole genealogy held together by Marie Ursule – their common slave ancestor – and haunted by her traumatic experience. For instance, Kamena and Bola are two protagonists affected in different ways by their tropical island. Kamena has been crushed by slavery and captivity; he is in search of a maroon camp and therefore of his freedom, and keeps looking for it until he loses himself in the luxuriant interior, while Bola, his daughter, stays on a beach in Culebra Bay and finds in the ocean a catharsis for the ghosts of her past. Appropriately, Dionne Brand’s non-fiction A Map to the Door of No Return (2001) is an attempt to find her own place of belonging, which she finally locates in the mind of all the people from the diaspora.

In Loving this Man (2001), Prince gives a vivid picture of the cultural, social, political and geographical context of the island of Antigua through the stories of four women, namely three sisters, Reevah, Sage and Juniper Berry, and Reevah’s daughter, Sayshelle. The evocation of the West Indies is mostly made through the relationships between these women and their environment, rather than through descriptions of individual quests for identity. While Prince’s novel deals with the topography of both Antigua and Toronto, her collection of essays, Being Black (2001), deals much more with her migrant condition and the concept of blackness, which did not seem to be such a significant issue in the tropics.

London-based accounts of the Guianas from the beginnings of European exploration to the formation of various separate political entities, strive to tell and retell the need of an English presence in South America. This drive to competitively negotiate imperial ambitions originates in part in the political geography of the contested area, balanced between the Spanish presence to the North and the Portuguese to the South, while facing similar attempts by the Dutch and the French. Yet it also originates in Raleigh’s hear-say reports of El Dorado, that native body politic. Variously a virtual space and/or its native ruler’s body, it haunts tales of the Guianas for 300 years, promising that ultimate European freedom: gold. This paper looks at the Guianese native American as a vibrant nexus of English publications of the period concerned. From a comparative analysis of fictional and non-fictional texts the Guiana "Indian" emerges as contested ground herself, oscillating between stereotypes of native subservience and innate sovereignty, gendered Otherness and emerging racial constructions, narrative appeals to exploitation and an often paradoxical rhetoric of political liberation. Even worn-out tropes such as Cannibalism can emerge as de/perception, provided access to a possible El Dorado remains within the reach of the English. The eventual marginalisation of this figure in later texts (in favour of a focus on slavery) can be related to its embodiment of such political topoi and subsequent superfluousness once colonial rule became an established reality.

This paper explores Elizabeth Nunez’s novel Beyond the Limbo Silence (1998) for its reconfiguring of the southern Civil Rights Movement, shifting its meanings further south by imaginatively entangling Freedom Summer of 1964 with a Trinidadian family’s history and with images of obeah and calypso. While the novel explores correlations between colonialism in the Caribbean and racial segregation in the South, it also comments significantly on northern white enclaves that endeavour to remain removed from "southern" civil rights struggles. In 1963 three young women from Trinidad, St Lucia and British Guiana are made recipients of scholarships; the supposedly universal blackness of these foreign students allows them to racially  “integrate” a white school by standing in for African American students. However, via the Trinidadian protagonist and the bridge she makes between places in the American tropics, this paper teases out the ways in which in Nunez's syncretic fiction, ideas of the “local” are unfixed and the direction the “Movement” takes is traced in spiritual and mythological as well as morally suggestive ways. 

While representations of the Caribbean are striking in their schizophrenic character, particularly jarring is the contrast between the region’s circulation as a carefree paradise in tourist versions and the history of violence and terror depicted in its literature. This is not to suggest that the converse is impossible: that tourists are unaware of threat and danger in the contemporary Caribbean and that Anglophone Caribbean literature is devoid of carnivalesque ribaldry, trickster humor, and irrepressible jouissance. My reference here to the bipolar contrast in representation is not intended to reinforce either a stereotype of untroubled holiday carousing or of irreversible cultural deviance and dysfunction. Rather, incidents of crime and violence have their own stories to tell, and fictional and non-fictional accounts of Caribbean social turmoil reveal—or, in some cases, obscure—a history that can neither be crushed by the juggernaut of calamity nor be buried under enabling myths of triumphant survival.

This paper focuses on literary representations (the Naipauls, Wilson Harris, Fred D’Aguiar) of the Michael X killings in Trinidad and the Jonestown tragedy in Guyana, arguing that what seem meaningless acts of murder and mass suicide are rooted in a long history of violence and dispossession. I use the organic metaphor of roots deliberately, since many Caribbean writers embed their catastrophic narratives in the very soil of the tropics, intertwining nature, culture and history, as implied in titles such as Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones, which deals with the massacre of Haitians in the Dominican Republic, or Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night, which relates a domestic tragedy of rape, incest and abuse. In V. S. Naipaul’s cynical reading of the cult of personality, the carnival ethos of Trinidad, for example, enables the trickster persona to run amok, descending from the picaresque to the dangerously criminal. Shiva Naipaul describes his reluctant arrival into Guyana to assess the aftermath of the Jonestown deaths as the beginning of a "jungly nightmare." What Michelle Cliff perceives as Caribbean "ruination"--the agency of the rebellious tropical wilderness fighting attempts to subdue it--he reads more negatively as the inevitable confluence of untamed landscape and uncivil politics. Wilson Harris counters such depictions with a philosophy that is at once mystic and abstract as well as implanted in the physical geography of the region. I will analyze the ways in which such depictions offer a complex perspective of events in Caribbean history.

This paper uses Patrick Chamoiseau’s 1988 novel Solibo Magnifique as a way into thinking about the concept of creolization. It attempts, first, to examine Chamoiseau’s text from a slightly different angle from that which it has tended to be considered in Postcolonial Studies – that is, less in terms of the relationship between the French and Creole languages and more in terms of the impact on cultural practice of Martinique’s socio-economic transformation following departmentalisation. Examining the issues of commodity fetishism and the attenuation of history, the paper goes on to consider how the concept of creolization might be deployed as an optic through which to map the social totality and penetrate beyond a reified social order. In so doing, it considers the various different uses to which ideas of creolization have been put in the Caribbean context, stressing in particular the way many earlier elaborations of the concept are ill-served by later appropriations by certain theoretical tendencies within Postcolonial Studies. Considering the work of Fernando Ortiz, George Lamming, and Edouard Glissant, the paper seeks to show how creolization can be used to map Caribbean space – its physical and social geography – in such a way as to reveal the human agency and structural determinants shaping its form.

This paper aims to explore the roles of textuality in creating the geographies in and of postcolonial literary texts. The paper focuses on the texts and contexts of the novels of two Caribbean writers – Wilson Harris and Maryse Condé – whose lives and work have been characterised by movement between the Caribbean, Africa and Europe. The paper begins by highlighting the ways in which emplacement, displacement and placelessness are imagined through language within the texts. In particular it asks the extent to which the fluid movements between diverse Caribbean and standard English/French language forms within these texts facilitate creative theorisations of what it is to be ‘placed’ in Caribbean diaspora contexts. The second part of the paper looks at essays and interviews with these two novelists to explore the dynamics of emplacement, displacement and placelessness that inform the production of their texts. In particular this section explores the different ways in which each writer places themselves and their own literary production within global publication output, and what ‘places’ are given (or denied) to Caribbeanness, diaspora and postcoloniality by each writer. Finally the paper considers the broader relationships between language and spatiality in these novels, and points to ways forward in looking at and drawing on the complex spatialities of postcolonial literature.

When American landscape painter Winslow Homer arrived in Havana in February 1885, he found, as he wrote to his brother, a "red hot place full of soldiers" where "they had just condemned six men to be shot for landing with arms, & from all accounts they deserved it." Finding in the Santiago de Cuba, where he remained a month, "the richest field for an artist that I have seen," Homer produced dozens of powerful watercolors in which he captures his vision of an orient-like colony of great romantic allure where the last bastion of the Spanish empire in the Americas was poised to defend itself against upstart revolutionaries. Homer’s embracing of/by the colonial authorities—which resulted in his shimmering portrait of The Governor’s Wife—led to a favorable representation of the Spanish presence in Cuba that was in marked contrast to the critical stance adopted by most American visitors to Cuba, such as Julia Howe and Eliza McHatton-Ripley.

In this paper I trace three thematic threads that together speak to the significance of Homer’s Cuban watercolors to our understanding of the dialogue between the Americas in the decade preceding the Spanish American War. The first is an analysis of Homer’s work and of how his palette, subjects, and gaze romanticize the continued Spanish presence in Cuba. The second is the tensions in the dialogue between Homer’s artistic representation and the writings of American visitors to Cuba like W. M. L. Jay (My Winter in Cuba, 1871) and Julia Howe (A Trip to Cuba, 1860), whose explicit or implicit agenda was the critique of Spanish control over an island that belonged, in their view, in the sphere of US influence, preferably as a US territory. The third is the mixed critical and popular reception of Homer’s Cuban paintings and how we can read this mixed reception within the context of popular opinion in the US about a continued Spanish military presence so close to the nation’s southern borders.

Private property was an alien concept to the Caribs, Arawaks and transported African slaves who inhabited the American Tropics. As such, the colonial house with its foundations in slave labour, indentureship and the plantation remains an especially contentious construct in the American Tropics. Whilst 1930s Trinidad is generally perceived as a golden era in which the island’s literary establishment lionised the folk culture of the barrack yard, this period is rarely assessed for its lingering literary attachment to the plantation. Founded on the consumption of natural resources, black and brown bodies and labour in the Tropics, the imperial domain and its domination of Trinidadian landscape bears many geo-historic links to the plantation house. This paper forwards a topo-analysis of the colonial house with respect to its material, social and ideological thresholds in the novels of Yseult Bridges.

To date neither of Yseult Bridges’s novels Questing Heart or Creole Enchantment has received any critical attention. How much this is due to her relative obscurity, the overt racism of her fiction or her use of the pseudonym Tristram Hill, it is difficult to surmise. Yseult Bridges’s novels give access to the exclusivity of the house, its grounds, its gardens and the wider terrain inhabited by the island’s elite. The dynamics between ‘insiders’ and ‘aliens’ are examined with regard to the house and the psycho-social and -geographic considerations of its inhabitants. The paper concludes with an investigation of the relationship between the colonial house and the exploitation of tropical resources – in particular, in Yseult Bridges’s Creole Enchantment, Trinidad’s emergent black gold: oil.

‘It is hard to ignore the hotels,’ Ian Strachan begins his Paradise and Plantation (2002). ‘They rise like mammoths of iron and concrete above the homes, the office buildings, the trees of New Providence, island of my birth.’ Such hotels are often routinely derided by anti-tourists as fortified enclaves which studiously protect guests from the manifold annoyances and dangers that seem to await them beyond the gates.

But even a strikingly different Caribbean hotel like the slightly run-down gingerbread mansion favoured by many journalists, senior military personnel, anthropologists, aid workers, and up-market literary travellers visiting Port-au-Prince in Haiti, can still be described by one of them as a 'tactful fortress.’

My paper draws on a selection of first-hand English-language accounts of the Hotel Oloffson from the last twenty years or so in an attempt to exploit this felicitious choice of phrase. It identifies some of the ways in which these writer-guests imaginatively inhabit the various private and public spaces of this particular tropical hotel and its surroundings. I pay special attention to two rhetorical devices which are deployed with some regularity.

(1) ‘I must get back to my hotel’: the embedded mini-narratives in which the narrator leaves the safety of the hotel to risk the city beyond and returns, somewhat relieved, usually in the early hours of the morning.

(2) ‘Perturbations pendant la nuit’: scenes in which reminders of these risks seem to intrude on the private space of the hotel itself in the form of overheard sounds, such as helicopters, gunfire, screams - sounds which are often jokingly misinterpreted and trivialised.

The results of the military and scientific expedition of count Johann Moritz von Nassau-Siegen to northeast Brazil, from 1637 to 1644, are crucial for the interpretation of tropical visions in colonial America. The count was governor in the service of the Dutch West India Company. During his term and, long before comparative Enlightenment enterprises, Dutch plantation economy was established in Brazil as a modern enterprise; its origins being closely connected with the West African coast. This episode was studied in art history and in history of science but has not yet been adequately placed within the literary geography of the Americas.

Central in this contribution is the publication of the Rerum per octennium in Brasilia, written by the poet and philosopher Caspar Barlaeus and illustrated by the landscape painter Frans Post. The volume was published by the outstanding publishing house Ioan Blaue in Amsterdam, famous for the high quality of its city views, maps, and nautical instructions on sea routes, in 1647. Amsterdam was then at the centre of overseas expansion and of the art market in Europe.

I will analyze this book in view of its long-term effects in different countries as well as regarding its critical reflection of standards for understanding tropical America in the seventeenth century and today. The hiatus between the excitement of visual documentation and the less spectacular effect of writing in Latin offers a challenge for discussing the shifting frontiers between writing, scientific illustration, and art.

Two major tensions have marked the literature on Suriname and French Guiana since Europeans and their descendants first began describing these places. The natural environment appears alternatively as a menacing jungle and an edenic paradise. And the master/slave relationship is depicted either in terms of brutality/rebellion or of paternalism/docility. These tensions, and their linked tropes, constitute our changing same.

A second set of tensions, which emerge from these earlier oppositions, relate more directly to contemporary realities. Guyane, still carrying the stigma of its vast penal colony, is portrayed alternatively as a "Green Hell," or as the land of high-tech space exploration. And present-day Suriname is depicted either as an idyllic land of ethnic harmony and ecological riches or as a lawless cesspool of crime, corruption, and despoilation of the environment.

Following a thumbnail introduction to these four tensions, this paper offers a chronological tour through some of the more important texts where they come into play. And it ends with an introduction to a different, non-Western perspective on the same geographical space.

This paper proposes to trace how a local language is developed in interaction with the physical and historical features of a landscape and how literature, accordingly, is laden with the natural and cultural symptomologies of its locality.

The paper takes its point of departure in an analysis of Ladoo’s No Pain Like This Body (about indentured labourers in Trinidad). It looks at how the language of the novel’s landscape, or, rather, its langscape is endowed with sounds and sensory energies that are intricately evocative of the topography, flora, fauna and climate of the novel’s setting, altogether producing a comprehensive, synaesthetic sense-scape that combines "place-bound" imagescapes with soundscapes, smellscapes, colourscapes, heatscapes, speedscapes, etc. In this respect I propose to read the drama of Ladoo’s langscape in terms of Gumbrecht’s aesthetics of presence, i.e. how the impact of present objects on human bodies can be intensified in literature. Added to that I shall engage Deleuze’s ideas of how literature, as a production of compounds of sensation, suspends the representational dimension of language, causing words no longer to stand for e.g. a landscape, but to become the very sense-effects of that landscape.

Ladoo’s language is a composite hybridisation of English with Indian, African and Creole substratas. Such hybridisation is often read as a promise of a global transcultural heterogeneity. However, I intend to bracket any reading of the novel or its setting in the optics of world literature and celebratory internationalism. I will insist on how the novel’s language is subject to a gravitational pull towards its locality. Ladoo takes part in a process of developing a local language that is particularly attuned to enunciate the combined natural, cultural and historical processes of its particular place. In this respect, I will finally argue that the work, through its langscape, performs the very processes of local emplacement that Edward Casey speaks of. Its langscape makes sense in two ways: at once shaped by and shaping the physiognomy of its place, it both generates local sense-experiences and makes sense of the place to render it inhabitable.

This paper tests the theoretical framework of my book Volcanic Memory: Meditations on the Grenada Revolution. The legacy of the Grenada Revolution, its disastrous consequences for the intellectual, imaginative, and political life of the regional Left, continue to be shrouded in silence.

The paper explores the relationship between political memory and cultural geography. Through analyses of memorials, paintings and photographs, eyewitness narratives, calypso, and literature, I show the ways in which accounts of the revolution are situated in the Grenadian landscape. Thus, I show how sympathetic accounts of the Revolution weave it into the landscape, while dissident accounts tend to show a mismatch between the Revolution and the land/scape. Moreover, I argue that in light of the silence of both Left and Right on the subject of the Revolution, we must study the material traces of the Revolution in the landscape to recover memory of it.

The paper both analyzes and contributes to a poetics that can adequately remember the Grenada Revolution. The sites/geographies I look at include: "Hurricane," "Fort," "Hills," "Prison," "Volcano," "Faultlines," "Sky," "Continent," and "Archipelago."

Since not all these sites correspond in any obvious way to the Revolution, let me offer some brief examples of their logic: A developing body of literature speaks of the Revolution in terms of a hurricane, and specifically understands it in relation to Hurricane Ivan. In "Sky," I contrast accounts of the sky during the period of Grenadian history (the Gairy-led agitations for wage-raises) called "Sky Red" with those of the last days of the Revolution, which describe the experience of looking up at skies ablaze with bombs, and blackened by US helicopters. The Fort, where Maurice Bishop and others were executed, is the scene of the crime to which many accounts return. "Archipelago" develops a poetics that understands the Grenada Revolution as a regional rather than a national event.

This paper will explore the cultural imaginary of the city of Salvador da Bahia, looking at the way its multilayered cultural and social history has informed the work of writers and cultural producers.

Former capital of Brazil and present-day capital of the State of Bahia, Salvador lays claim to a distinctive and highly visible identity which reflects its past as part of the slave trade and its present as a centre of Afro-Brazilian culture. This urban environment is home to one of the most culturally diverse set of peoples in the Americas but shares the social inequality and rising crime of other cities in the region.

A number of authors and cultural producers are rooted in Bahia to such a degree that their work charts the social and cultural history of Salvador. Writer Jorge Amado blended description of the city and its characters with fiction to create a hybrid form of writing which has come to represent Salvador both inside and outside Brazil. The lyrics of socially active singer-songwriters Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso from the time of tropicalismo, through the introduction of Reggae in Portuguese, to the present day have proved to be instrumental in establishing a distinct identity for soteropolitanos. Film director Sergio Machado has brought Jorge Amado’s Salvador to the screen and also examined the realities of contemporary urban life in the internationally released film Cidade Baixa.

I will ask how this cultural production which includes unique aspects of Salvador’s culture such as capoeira, candomblé, orixas and samba-reggae expresses the subjectivity and distinctness of Salvador and its inhabitants and yet remains an integral part of the American tropics. To answer this I will examine how Salvador forms part of Antonio Benitez-Rojo’s "meta-archipelago" by looking in detail at his concept of "the repeating island" and I will refer to postcolonial theories of hybridity in order to establish Salvador’s identity as a third space inhabited by a diasporic Lusophone people.

Whatever the validity of New Orleans’ claims to singularity, it is perhaps its plurality which is its most constantly dynamic quality, the factor which most contributes to its asserted special status: its cultural identity is as unstable as its swampy foundations. Indeed, the very reasons variously put forth for the city’s difference are frequently at odds with each other, and sometimes directly contradictory – all of which makes for a rich, beguiling dialogic realm, a place of transition, translation, and transfiguration. If the status of New Orleans as an ‘American’ city is problematic in the United States’ sense, then it is surely a fascinating paradigm of ‘America’ when we think more openly, continentally and transatlantically. These ambiguities are even more pertinent when we begin considering New Orleans as a ‘Southern’ place. This paper will examine the writings of a number of European travellers to the city in the early decades of the nineteenth-century: that is, the years after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 that rendered it part of the southern United States. In many cases, New Orleans is a stop on an itinerary that includes travel throughout the Americas, and it is posited as the site of myriad influences, as well as a point of crucial contact between North America and the rest of the hemisphere, and indeed the world. The allegiances, politics, and intentions of these accounts are as varied as the city itself, but they all register New Orleans as a transitional, transnational place: if it has only recently become ‘Southern,’ as such, then its continuing status as a northern site in wider ‘plantation America,’ with the transatlantic importance this implies, renders this a paradigm site in the American Tropics.

Understanding geographies as movement, fluid zones, erasures of boundaries, and open histories, stories by Caribbean women writers look back to trace forgotten, silenced or banished ancestors, but also branch out to imagine a more inclusive Caribbean region.

This paper maps routes taken by women characters in Dionne Brand in At the Full and Change of the Moon, Margaret Cezair-Thompson in The True History of Paradise, and Marie-Elena John in Unburnable. Through geographies they explore a journey where language and cultural differences do not impede their engagement of dialogues on women's understanding of their points of origin and destination, their vision of homeland and metropole, and their transitory positions, whether intra-island or in diasporic communities.

The writers and their characters tell multiple family stories that recall ancestors– imagined, forgotten, or rescued from once-told tales, old diaries, letters and drawings– and, thus, rupture "conventional structures of meaning by which the particular reigns in order to give presence and voice to what was denied and repressed" (Ellen Friedman and Miriam Fuchs, Breaking the Sequence, 15). They write in fragments, as if weaving threads from clothes that have been handed down, or given away as gifts, or belonged to others, or were just recently purchased from a neighborhood store or a faraway catalogue; they write parallel stories in spaces and times in which the private, the domestic, the silences, the seemingly unimportant intersect. It is through the inclusion of real, virtual or imaginary experiences, that these stories are, following Iain Chambers, "perpetually interrupted or broken, and through the resulting gaps the silenced and the marginalized intercede in the telling of the world" (59).

In An Eye for the Tropics, art historian Krista Thompson argues that the tourist and photography industries of the 1890s produced a Caribbean tropicality, a system of iconic images of the Caribbean as picturesque and primitive that has shaped the representation of the region and its material realities to this day. Beaches, exotic plants and foods, market women carrying baskets of produce on their heads. These images erased the regions’ diversity, its modernity, in particular the role its workers played in the defining modern projects of the Panama Canal and multinational corporate agriculture.

This paper returns to 1890s Jamaica to illustrate that this reductive iconography was produced during a proliferation of new technologies of representation–photography, the postcard, the tourist guide–and a rejuvenation of old ones in local newspapers and literature. Photography and the tourist industry did produce a troplicality that served the interests of foreign corporations, but many Jamaicans also made use of photography and tourist writing for their own diverse interests. Jamaicans became photographers, commissioned photographs, collected postcards, and published tourist guides and travel narratives. The wide variety of representations undermined the emerging tropicality by exposing Jamaica’s urban spaces and industry, and it made the racial ideology of iconic photographs explicit in caricatured depictions of peasants and their language. Placing Jamaican writing from the turn of the century in the context of this emerging tourist iconography reveals that authors explicitly appropriated and sometimes challenged tourist icons. Thus, the conservative, Herbert de Lisser made use of the tourist guide to further his own career. By contrast, Claude McKay’s early verse and his novel Banana Bottom set in the early twentieth century challenged tropicality by redefining tourism’s use of specific images and proverbs as well as by representing Jamaica and Jamaicans as part of international system of modern capitalism. In sum, tropicality and emergent Jamaican national literature were produced through a complex contest between nationalist, internationalist, and imperialist stakeholders that involved multiple forms of representations and a host of unknown Jamaican authors and artists.

When Dorn came, in this book of 1974, to the theme of the historical territory of the Apache, he had already in Gunslinger explored critically what he saw as the American conversion of space into time. The genealogy of his poetics here involves Charles Olson and through him Karl Sauer. The paper will take up the opportunity to discuss how Dorn’s poetic language performs a critique of discourses of geography, of erasure of territory (and re-erasure in the late 20c: see Paul Virilio), and of the historical geopolitics of American empire.

The main hypothesis of the paper will be that Dorn exposes how the intersection of space, politics, and economics in the late 20c has made Sauer’s position no longer tenable and Olson’s poetics no longer viable. I will discuss in particular the problem of literature as traversing and traversed by politics, especially in its assumptions about the use of the earth. Finally, I will address the specific politics of language in Dorn’s late poetry.

In the course of the middle decades of the nineteenth century the US postal service not only expanded to fit the demands of an ever growing nation, but also became cheap and regular enough for correspondence to become part of the warp and weft of everyday life in the United States. Whereas in 1820 most Americans did not write or receive letters, by 1870 most did, and thus, as David Henkin argues, this era may rightfully be regarded as "The Postal Age."

Sending and receiving letters provided an increasingly mobile American populace with an invaluable means to cope with the emotional and social impact of partings that would sometimes last a lifetime. Epistolary culture enabled them to envision themselves as members of dispersed communities that were not constrained by locality or proximity, and to speak with a sense of immediacy and closeness that transcended dislocations over time and space.

What did such developments mean to the enslaved? Migration disproportionately effected African Americans living in the South, as they were parted by the combined forces of slaveholder relocations, the internal slave trade, the colonization movement, wartime disruption, and, not least, their own decisions to make their escapes. In different ways, these migrations shaped an African American Diaspora to which epistolary culture was just one response, yet nonetheless one that was to prove an essential survival strategy for some such migrants.

Using letters exchanged between enslaved and formerly enslaved ‘Black’ southerners, this paper will demonstrate that despite great obstacles, the postal age of American history was one in which African Americans participated and which presented them with significant opportunities. More than this, it will also show how the contingencies of their specific situations required them to develop literary tactics and practical strategies that together constitute a particular and exclusive epistolary culture.

In 1957 James Baldwin travelled for the first time to the Deep South and left an unforgettable record of his experiences. Despite the symbolic weight of the South in terms of the twentieth-century imaginings of race there appears to be no comparable record by West Indians. This paper will explore the connections and the disconnections between Anglophone Caribbeans and the Deep South (which for my purposes excludes Florida and Louisiana).

The South, of course, did not prove a natural destination for black visitors from the Caribbean, or from elsewhere. But even so the historic connections are close. Until the late C18 the southern colonies of the Thirteen Colonies comprised part of the same political system as the British-Caribbean. Before the Civil War a significant body of Southern opinion hoped that the slave states could expand southwards to incorporate Caribbean nations, as May discusses in The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire. The UNIA sought to build a common network across the entire region. During the years of decolonization and Civil Rights black leaders from the South, and proponents of Caribbean independence, often shared a politics: though the connections between the two were more likely to have been made in New York, London or Paris.

Yet in the collective imaginative record of the modern Anglophone Caribbean the idea of the South is strangely absent or displaced. Garvey, Padmore and James say remarkably little about their first encounters with the South. As far as I can tell, the Deep South only appears in the imaginative literature well after the Civil Rights years (Michelle Cliff, Austin Clarke, Fred D'Aguiar).

I’ll close with Naipaul’s lyrical engagement with the white South in his 1989 travelogue, inducing in him an identification which can only be understood as tragic.

Heidi V. Scott, Aberystwyth University

An American Eden? Geographical Imaginations and Tropicality in the Viceroyalty of Peru

The emergence of tripartite visions of Peru’s natural world and climate in colonial geographical imaginations is very familiar to historians of the Andean regions and, to some extent, the model of a landscape neatly divided into arid coastal plains, high mountain ranges and hot, wet eastern lowlands is still an influential one. Limited attention, however, has so far been paid to the ways in which notions of tropicality emerged in colonial Peru and, moreover, to how these ideas intersected with the tripartite geographical model. While early colonial writings – especially those produced by criollo scholars – frequently expressed praise for Peru’s natural and climatic attributes on account of its location within the tropics, the idealisation of Peruvian nature was often modulated and at times contradicted by descriptions of the three geographical regions and of particular places within them. Alongside representations of Peru as a country blessed with an ideal, near-Edenic climate and a rich and bountiful natural world, emphatically negative expressions of tropicality may also be found, above all in relation to the piedmont regions of the eastern Andes. Ambivalence is commonplace in European and Euroamerican portrayals of the tropics and has been given considerable attention in the growing academic literature on tropicality. This paper, however, seeks to bring to light the distinctive geographies of tropical ambivalence that characterise the writings of individuals such as Cieza de León, Bernabé Cobo and Antonio de León Pinelo. In doing so it considers the varied factors that shaped the geographies of tropicality that are expressed in these early modern writings on Peru, paying particular attention to the role of authorial experience of Peru’s landscapes and environments.

The literature of landscape during the eighteenth century was conceived within a colonial imaginary which located place and space within a nexus of aesthetics and health. As illness ravaged colonial populations, knowledge about which diseases were endemic to which regions came to be perceived as crucial to the success of the imperial endeavour. The epidemiological crisis in the colonies prompted Europeans to map disease onto the land itself. The localization of climates and pathogens informed, and was informed by, a set of colonial landscape aesthetics which depended upon the construction of an opposition between Western European and tropical landscapes. The localization of pathogens became the keystone of medical geography, prompting a massive imperial project which engaged in mapping geographical spaces across the globe in terms of local diseases. It was largely through this identification of disease with space that the colonies became conceptually ‘tropicalized’; the notion of a particular climate as tropical was conceptually structured by disease.

Understanding medico-geographical knowledge as the colonial frame for modelling the relationship between people and their environments, this paper will address the relationship between literary and geographical representations of disease and landscape in the eighteenth-century British Caribbean. I argue that both these forms of representation are characterized by a textual movement between the description of ‘landscape’ as a static visual object and a medicalized narrative of ‘environment’ as a mobile and interactive set of surroundings. Within the remit of this paper, therefore, ‘literary geography’ is, in part, suggestive of the need to comprehend this textual movement between ‘descriptions’ and ‘narratives’ of places and spaces.

The material culture, visual image, and literary tropes of a technologically advanced mobile modernity in the mid-20^th century United States was produced in relation to the American Tropics in several important ways. First, materially: a lighter, faster, gleaming aerodynamic modernism was engineered out of "the speed metal" aluminum, which came largely from the bauxite mines of Dutch Guiana/Suriname and Jamaica, the two largest suppliers in the world from the 1930s-70s. Second, symbolically: the sci-fi futurism of aluminum modernity was constructed via its contrast with a backward, slower, tropical world, which aluminum multinational Alcoa also promoted as an exotic tourism destination reached via its steamships. And third, theoretically: the contrast between Space Age modernity and tropical backwardness was crystallized into influential US theories of modernization such as W.W. Rostow’s, and the New World Group of economists’ counter-theories of dependency and dispossession.

Drawn from a larger book-in-progress, entitled The Age of Aluminum, this paper presents a visual/textual analysis of a collection of advertising images promoting the Alcoa Steamship Company, published in Holiday magazine from 1948-1958, along with related articles, travel writing, corporate pamphlets and promotional films. By closely examining the aluminum industry’s visual representations of its bauxite mining lands in the Caribbean alongside its post-War dreams of Space Age super-modernity, the paper reconnects the valuation of modern U.S. American mobility, air power, and speed with the immobile, backwards, "pre-modern" ground of the American Tropics upon and against which it was produced. Following aluminum "out of the ground, into the sky" underpins a crucial connection between divergent modernities. It traces a metallic thread through the material and visual culture of the age of aluminum at the very time when Caribbean states were attempting to negotiate labor rights, political rights, and national sovereignty, and to negotiate resource sovereignty with multinational aluminum corporations backed by the US government and its military power in the region.

The rainforest has been above all an exercise of the imagination, the place where the chroniclers and the conquistadors imagined they would find the treasures and see the wonders they were looking for, and thus the trace of legends and mythology attached to the topography.

To a certain extent the rainforest was the last place inhabited by creatures whose existence had been long ago contested in Europe. It was also the last space where chivalry novels were enacted. And before its ongoing destruction it was probably also the last opportunity to leave the world behind and start anew, away from social conventions and restrictions, a synonym of freedom.

The rainforest has been thought of as a primeval space, previous to history. Because of this, it has kept its mysterious allure, a space where time collapses or ceases to exist: a mythical time without time.

Paradise and hell, utopia and condemnation, the rainforest is an emerald labyrinth that needs to be named in order to be acknowledged. A fundamental image of otherness, of what isn’t human and crushes identity, it is the world that precedes the word, thus the importance of baptizing it, of articulating its muteness and its noises through the web of language. Geopoetics arises out of this need.

In the paper I will study the conformation of some of these aspects through the narrative of Alejo Carpentier as an example of how the topos of rainforest becomes logos that triggers displacements between urban space and nature, history and prehistory, as part of the dialectics of literary geography.

In 1808 Beilby Porteus, the Bishop of London, whose diocese included the West Indies, anticipated a new phase of "truly Imperial works" for the "English Nation": a "universal benevolence" which would "immortalize it to the latest posterity". His call was accompanied by a plan for a New System for the Education of the Poor in the West Indies, developed by Andrew Bell. In Antigua Porteus’ letter reportedly inspired Anne Hart Gilbert (1768-1834) to establish with the help of her sister Elizabeth Hart Thwaites (1771-1833) a non-denominational Sunday School at English Harbour in September 1809. Inspired by a local vision of national reform and modernisation, Anne Hart Gilbert established in 1816 the Female Refuge Society, an organisation committed to improving the "unhappy condition of some of the free young females in that neighbourhood". She soon became its Agent, and was also active in other benevolent enterprises around English Harbour. In this paper I examine the scope and reach of her writing after 1816 and extant reports of the Female Refuge Society and their traffic through family and patronage networks to Britain. This writing (letters, a pious biographical tract, an account of her Christian conversion of a black Muslim man, reports) is not collected in The Hart Sisters: Early African Caribbean Writers, Evangelicals and Radicals, edited by Moira Ferguson. I am particularly interested in the self/other relations and the local and transatlantic cultural and moral geographies of benevolence inscribed in them. In British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility Brycchan Carey argues that by the early nineteenth century the metropolitan rhetoric of sensibility had lost its force in the British politics of anti-slavery. My primary texts and their circulation show the way in which colonial discourses of sensibility trafficked to benevolent circles in Britain affected the rise of women’s anti-slavery activism in the 1820s and 1830s and reinvigorated the scope of sensibility as a political rhetoric of anti-slavery campaigning. Some of the primary texts were a staple in the work-bags of the Birmingham Ladies' Society for the Relief of British Negro Slaves, the first female anti-slavery association, and shaped its visual understandings of a moralised West Indian geography.

As Panama Canal publicity peaks in the early 20th century, U.S. intellectuals frame the American tropics as a problem. Geographer Ellsworth Huntington’s 1915 Climate and Civilization compares the more industrious, temperate, and healthy U.S. to the American tropics, a troubled place of laziness, impulsivity, lust, and disease.

Similarly, former U.S. consul to Venezuela and Nicaragua, James Weldon Johnson contrasts "the strenuous life" of the U.S. with "the tropical mode" which encourages laziness, immaturity, and romantic intrigue. Waldo Frank is more optimistic in his America Hispana: Frank perceives "tropical passion" as proof of greater spirituality and vision, and he identifies the main problem as a lack of necessary "tools," or technology. Thus, both Frank and Johnson perceive the American tropics as a problem.

One solution, U.S. involvement, is epitomized by the Canal Zone, an encouraging exception to the general tropical rule. Despite the prevalence of tropical diseases elsewhere, medical research at Panama’s Gorgas Institute allows Huntington to be impressed by the Zone’s general "healthfulness." Johnson remarks on the accomplishments of black manual laborers, and he is amazed at the availability of job opportunities for educated blacks in the Zone. Not simply an improvement upon the tropical work ethic, Johnson’s Zone is an improvement upon U.S. racism. With similar appreciation of a mutual exchange, Frank casts the Zone as a space where U.S. technology marries tropical passion to construct the Panama Canal, a monument to the possibilities of Pan-American unity.

By acknowledging problems in U.S. culture—racism and spiritual emptiness— Johnson and Frank represent the Zone as a remedial space for both the tropics and the U.S. This paper will explore their accounts’ shifting acceptance and criticism of the "tropics as problem" discourse (and its attendant affirmation of U.S. exceptionalism) as a justification for U.S. ownership of the Zone.

This paper explores idea the of Guayana as a physical and imaginative space. Both ethnological and literary materials are used to demonstrate how "Guayana" has emerged through time, in both indigenous and national discourses, as an epitome of the tropical. Fantastic marvels, unnatural sexuality, cannibal violence, as well as the ever-present threat of moral and mental dissolution, are deeply inscribed as the defining features of this land of Amazon women and gilded men.

-- M.M. Bakhtin

Theorists and historians of the modern novel from Ian Watt to Benedict Anderson have consistently described the genre's ideological operations, as well as its genesis, with respect to interanimating concepts of national space and individual identity. This paper examines a particular challenge to this conceptual connection posed by Américo Paredes’ "Mexicotexan" novel George Washington Gómez ([1936-40] 1990) in order to better understand the relationship between historically specific conceptions of literary form and the equally historical movements of ideology.

Although U.S. critical responses to George Washington Gómez have widely recognized Paredes’ critique of standing models of space and individual identity, they have consistently separated the novel's interests in patria and identity from its literary form by either ignoring, or proceeding in spite of, what are held to be its aesthetic deficiencies. Rolando Hinojosa underscores this tendency in his introduction to the Arte Público Press edition of George Washington Gómez by way of apology: "It's a first draft, and it should be seen and appreciated as an historical work, not as an artifact." This critical anxiety stems less from issues of stylistics than from irregularities in the novel's narrative structure: lacunae in the spatial and temporal movements of the text seem at odds with the presiding generic framework of the Bildüngsroman. The narrative traces the movement of the protagonist's family from a complexly contested cultural space in the rural llano of southeastern Texas to the (also culturally contested) littoral city of Jonesville (Brownsville) situated on the Gulf of Mexico and the U.S.-Mexican border. After following its protagonist through his senior year in high school in Jonesville, the narrative jumps abruptly to his return to Jonesville many years later as a professionally established, married man. Signally absent is any direct depiction of the crucial stages of his years in college and his relocation to Washington D.C. to work as an intelligence officer for the U.S. government.

My paper reads the narrative discontinuities in Paredes’ text not as aesthetic irregularities but rather as an attempt to fashion what I will term, following Mikhail Bakhtin, a post-national chronotope. On this reading, Paredes’ reflections upon space and identity only become fully legible through attention to the conception of time-space produced by shifts in the intrinsically temporal medium of prose. By staging the particular combination of temporal shifts and spatial movements that it does, the novel points up the inadequacy of the nationalist chronotope intrinsic to the Bildüngsroman to accommodate the experiences of historically (spatially and temporally) situated subjects. To the extent that the Bildüngsroman, as critics from Bakhtin to Franco Moretti remind us, developed as an attempt to reconcile newly emerging concepts of historical and private—i.e. national and individual—time and space, Paredes’ text calls into question not merely the primacy but the utility of national identifications to the constitution of individual identity. At the level of critical hermeneutics, such a reading asks us to reconsider the aesthetic not as a separable category from the ideological but as part and parcel of ideological operations.

Las memorias de Mamá Blanca (1928) by Venezuelan iconoclast Teresa de la Parra, Macunaíma (1928) by Brazilian polymath Mário de Andrade, and Leyendas de Guatemala (1930) by Nobel Laureate Miguel Angel Asturias, are texts that address the avant-garde obsession with language origin by immersing it in the fertility of the tropical rainforest and in the cosmography of the pre-Iberian and colonial past. Such staging allows three textual objectives to be met: (1) to employ a full range of Latin American cultural contexts (indigenous, African, mestizo, criollo, and European, among others) in order to highlight issues of language contact and influence; (2) to contextualize certain neotropical fauna—predominantly reptiles, amphibians, and birds— in order to symbolize an autochthonous language origin; and (3) to portray the neotropics in general as a geographically mutable zone, facilitating linguistic as well as corporeal metamorphoses among the characters. In these key narratives, the writers not only problematize the practice of expressing, or immersing, indigenous idioms (such as Quiché and Tupi) and worldviews—as well as examples of language contact, dialect, and register—in a romance language, but they also do so in a way in which the arbitrary relationships between signifier and signified echo the equally arbitrary nature of phenotypical traits such as sex and skin tone. All three writers link such bodily features to linguistic acts of importance in these narratives, such as language learning, the production of metaphor and simile, translation, and the conscious control of language that an author may strive to display or subvert. In my presentation I will analyze textual examples and conclude by focusing on the relationship between language production and metaphors associated with spitting, a bodily act highlighted strikingly in all three texts.

The Peruvian-Colombian War of 1932 to 1933 gave rise to a large body of writing, including the novel Rio Putumayo, published in a revised form in 1986 by one of Iquitos’ leading writers, Jaime Vásquez Izquierdo. The novel gives an account of the military campaign from the perspective of a young Peruvian soldier, Miguel Valdez, who travels to the front in order to escape the poverty of the Belén district of Iquitos, and who finds himself plunged into an even more hostile environment in the forests of the Peruvian Amazon.

This paper will explore one of the persistent themes of the novel (and writing on the Putumayo in general): the dichotomy between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, terms recast in the novel as ‘loretanos’ (those from Loreto) and ‘costeños’ (those from the coast), or ‘lugareños’ (locals) and ‘peruanos’ (Peruvians). The difference between loretanos and soldiers from other regions of Peru is epitomised in the novel by the former’s perception of the jungle as enchanted. This paper will explore how the loretano soldiers and, furthermore, Vásquez Izquierdo, establish the Amazonian rather than the Peruvian identity of the Putumayo by engaging in storytelling about some of the forest’s supernatural inhabitants.

Readers of Jesús Castellanos’s "La agonía de La Garza" ("La Garza’s Agony") are treated to a spiralling mise en abime in the story’s opening lines, as we enter the outermost circle of several concentric narratives about the vessel’s disastrous final voyage off the coast of Matanzas in the island of Cuba. It is tempting to criticize Castellanos for the heavy-handed literary contrivance in this otherwise jewel of a story. However, the timeworn technique of mise en abîme serves not only the predictable purpose of heightening anticipation and intensifying the suspense, but by multiplying the telling of the wreck the narrative regressions underscore the text’s meta-discursiveness constituted in the intratextual reflections implied by the several narrative layers. Our literary narrator, as it turns out, is not so much a creator as a mediator for a series of oral and written accounts originating in the testimony of the lone survivor of ‘La Garza’s’ wreck. In those reflections Castellanos considered his text’s place in a narrative "tradition" and its role within that tradition as a cultural artifact of a particular kind. Moreover, he mirrored in the authorial persona of the narrator, his own intertextual mediation of representations of colonial shipwrecks from the Caribbean and beyond to tell the story of a uniquely Cuban tragedy.

This paper is part of a larger project on images of shipwreck in Cuban literature and the visual arts, extracted from the opening chapter on the relationship between Castellanos’s interest in painting and his composition of "La agonía de La Garza." It interprets the story’s exuberant transtextuality in relation to the French painter Théodore Géricault’s ethical political project in "Le radeaux de la Méduse;" as a meditation, that is, on the vital challenges facing the Cuban nation at the turn of the century as it emerged from colonialism under the shadow of neo-colonialism.

James Davis, Brooklyn College, CUNY, "Success Story": Writing Brooklyn from Black Britain

Martha Nadell, Brooklyn College, CUNY, A Tree Grows in Bajan Brooklyn: Paule Marshall’s Transnational/Multicultural Space

Oneka LaBennett, Fordham University, "He Stood His Ground": Space, Place, Gender and Transnationalism for West Indian Girls in Brooklyn

As audience members enter our session, a map of Brooklyn from the 2004 census will be projected on a screen. The image shows Flatbush Avenue performing two distinct but related spatial functions. Bisecting the borough on a north-south axis, it is a connector joining the Manhattan Bridge to Brighton Beach and everything in between. But it is also a divider, demarcating the whiter, more affluent region to its west from the east’s relative blackness and modest incomes. Though many Brooklyn neighborhoods have their own distinctive Flatbush Avenue, the color-coded census map paints a starker socioeconomic portrait than some might expect of such a diverse borough. Crossing Flatbush Avenue, then, refers not only to a physical movement of people through the borough’s spaces, but since space is never value neutral, also to the issues of race, income, social mobility, and knowledge that inflect those spaces. However, the census map’s codes conceal even as they reveal. Employing the terms "black" and "white," the map superimposes a false racial binarism on Brooklyn residents, obscuring intra-racial differences in culture, ethnicity, and national origin. By attending to one of Brooklyn’s largest and most established ethnic communities, the Caribbean community, this session explores this tension between race and ethnicity, a tension embedded in transnational and multicultural Caribbean Brooklyn. We are interested in how Brooklyn’s spaces have informed the collective identities of Caribbeans in the diaspora and, in turn, how they have inhabited and appropriated these spaces.

This community’s experiences have not been uniform over time, and a sense of key shifts and continuities will emerge from our papers’ range across different historical moments and distinct disciplinary approaches.

James Davis examines a story about 1920s Brooklyn by Eric Walrond. "Success Story," Davis argues, refers at once to the Guyanese protagonist’s acquisition of a prestigious job in Manhattan and to his evasion of the racializing logic that would make a Negro of him the way it has others in the Brooklyn community to which he has immigrated. "Success Story" is an account of 1920s Caribbean Brooklyn but is also marked by the place and time of its composition, an 1950s England transformed by immigration from former colonies.

Martha Nadell casts Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones as a revision of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Far from simply rewriting Smith’s novel, Marshall offers a complex account of ethnicity and race in the 1950s by foregrounding tensions between transnational, immigrant identity and the normative African-Americanness of diasporic blackness. The novel narrates this tension through place, she observes, as Brooklyn’s streets, parks, and interiors form a cartography of social, political, and domestic relations.

Finally, using ethnographic interviews conducted at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, Oneka LaBennett explores how girls in an after-school program define themselves in the context of New York City through leisure activities and popular culture. LaBennett devotes special attention to her informants’ appropriation of the symbol of Roger Touissant in their struggle to claim hegemonic space and negotiate their mutually constructed West Indian and African American identities.

Focusing on a short story by Eric Walrond, my paper situates Brooklyn as a geographic and imaginative fulcrum in the early twentieth century West Indian diaspora as it was lived in and across different continents. Written in rural England in 1954 and set in 1910s Brooklyn, "Success Story" is concerned with both these times and places – with its protagonist’s experience immigrating to New York and, more obliquely, with the experience of its itinerant author (West Indian, New Negro, and Black British) in an England infused with former colonial subjects. "Success Story" indexes the tension between being an immigrant and being a Negro in the early twentieth century U.S. Significantly, Walrond centers the story not on Harlem but on Brooklyn, which figures here as an equivocal space: a site of acculturation, it’s a staging ground for learning to become an ethnic American. But it is also a racializing space in which West Indians become Negroes through the brutal alchemy of racial binarism. My paper reads this dynamic in "Success Story" in order to engage larger questions about Walrond’s career and the diasporic displacements it emblematizes.

On one hand, "Success Story" shares many features of classic U.S. immigrant narratives. It begins with young Jim Prout’s arrival in Brooklyn, following his struggle to adjust to strange living conditions, cultural codes, and work expectations. The tropes of Jim’s transition – rural to urban, religious to secular, communal identity to individual identity – are familiar. On the other hand, because of Jim’s darkness and ethnicity (Guyanese by way of Barbados and Panama), race routinely disrupts his story’s typicality. Staging a tension between Jim’s status as an immigrant and a Negro, Walrond traces a Barbadian community’s domestic and religious practices, conflicts between immigrant generations, and the translation of race, class, and ethnicity across borders. The story ends with Jim’s hard-won success at finding decent work, a Manhattan clerical position. Here, a multi-ethnic workforce conducts multinational business, marking Manhattan in cosmopolitan opposition to Brooklyn’s ethnic provincialism. Thus, Jim’s "success" lies not only in the job but also in its ostensible resolution of the immigrant-Negro tension. "‘He is not a nigger,’ [the boss] growled with a glint in his blue eyes. ‘He is a foreigner.’" Far from resolving the immigrant-Negro tension, however, this abrupt ending invites an ironic reading: Jim has eluded conventional racialization, avoided the fate of other West Indians whose immigrant stories are overscored by stories of Negro racialization. But what, then, is Jim’s relationship to West Indian Negroes? To those born in the U.S.? "Success Story" also implicitly raises the post-colonial conditions in England at the time of its publication; namely, the question of West Indian immigration and Black Britain, which had simmered since at least the 1930s and would boil over in the late 1950s.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is probably Brooklyn’s most famous novel. Published during World War II, it has enjoyed a surprising popularity, given its at times sentimentalizing tone, its didacticism, and its lack of engagement with the ethnic mix of Brooklyn.

Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones rewrites A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, re-casting the drama of a poor, ethnically Irish and German girl and her family. Brown Girl, Brownstones takes the plot, characters, and rhythm of the earlier novel and places them in an account of a Bajan, immigrant family in Brooklyn. But the novel is not simply a rewriting and critique of an earlier text. It moves to a complex account of the ethnicity and race by foregrounding the tensions between a transnational, immigrant identity and the normative African American-ness of a black, diasporic identity in 1950s America.

My paper explores the manner in which this tension is narrated through place – the neighborhoods of Brooklyn, the streets that serve as boundaries between social groups, and the park that disrupts the racial/ethnic narrative – and space – the interiors of the houses that command the attention of the characters and narrator. I discuss the novel’s cartography as account of its social, political, and domestic relations. I situate Brown Girl, Brownstones in West Indian immigration to and settlement in the United States (specifically to Brooklyn) and the social rituals that make this simultaneously a post-colonial account of exile and a critique of limited narrations of nationhood.

The paper explores how Black teenagers who frequent an after-school program at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum (BCM) in Brooklyn, New York, utilize leisure activities and popular culture to define themselves within the context of New York City. Focusing on first- and second-generation West Indian adolescent girls, I interpret extra-curricular activities in and around BCM as spatializing forces that help to construct transnational racial and gender identities. Conceptualizing BCM as a space that takes on the ability to confirm identity, I follow Setha Low, defining spatialize as "locat[ing], both physically and conceptually, social relations and social practices in social space" (Low 1996, 2002: 111). Drawing on how youth identified with the President of the New York City Transit Workers Union (TWU) during the 2006 transit workers strike, I interpret my informants’ symbolic alliance with union leader, Roger Toussaint, as indicative of their struggles to claim hegemonic space. I show how such counter-hegemonic claims are tenuous, as the youngsters navigate what it means to be female, West Indian, and Black within the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Flatbush and Crown Heights, and within the larger context of New York City. By naming a float in a BCM event after Toussaint, the girls demonstrated their political engagement with life outside the Museum. I analyze the gendered space of the Museum to reveal how West Indian and African American identities are mutually constructed within and beyond this cultural institution.