Carnival in the Creole City: Place, Race and Identity in the Age of Globalization

In this essay I argue that Haitian-American artists Edwidge Danticat and Wyclef Jean employ Carnival symbolism to explore the practices and politics of belonging in global cities. While meditating on the cultural and social dynamism produced by transnationalism, they resist the impulse to idealize its effects. In song and nonfictional narrative, they reflect also on the ways that historical and structural violence shape the lives of Haitian migrants in creolized cities

The City-Child\u27s Quest: Spatiality and Sociality in Paule Marshall\u27s The Fisher King

In The Fisher King, Paule Marshall depicts urban spatial and social relations that resonate with the psychic and social ruptures of the African Diaspora. The novel’s central characters comprise a blended family with Southern African American and Caribbean roots. They reckon with problems of social marginalization, alienation, and fragmentation, engendered by their various experiences of dislocation. While mindful of the diverse histories, values, and worldviews within black America’s heterogeneous collectivity, Marshall ultimately privileges black women’s perspectives on the limits and possibilities of traversing geographic and social spaces. Hattie Carmichael, the “City child” who occupies the moral center of the novel, embodies practices of cultural improvisation, self-determination, and intersubjective reciprocity; practices that make it possible for diasporic subjects to claim and assign meaning to the places and spaces that they inhabit

Blackness Written, Erased, Rewritten James Weldon Johnson, Teju Cole, and the Palimpsest of Modernity

Book summary: James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) exemplified the ideal of the American public intellectual as a writer, educator, songwriter, diplomat, key figure of the Harlem Renaissance, and first African American executive of the NAACP. Originally published anonymously in 1912, Johnson\u27s novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is considered one of the foundational works of twentieth-century African American literature, and its themes and forms have been taken up by other writers, from Ralph Ellison to Teju Cole. Johnson\u27s novel provocatively engages with political and cultural strains still prevalent in American discourse today, and it remains in print over a century after its initial publication. New Perspectives contains fresh essays that analyze the book\u27s reverberations, the contexts within which it was created and received, the aesthetic and intellectual developments of its author, and its continued relevance in American literature and global culture. -- from back coverhttps://scholarworks.smith.edu/afr_books/1005/thumbnail.jp

Passing Strange: Embodying and Negotiating Difference in Academia

Book summary: In recent decades, American universities have begun to tout the “diversity” of their faculty and student bodies. But what kinds of diversity are being championed in their admissions and hiring practices, and what kinds are being neglected? Is diversity enough to solve the structural inequalities that plague our universities? And how might we articulate the value of diversity in the first place? Transforming the Academy begins to answer these questions by bringing together a mix of faculty—male and female, cisgender and queer, immigrant and native-born, tenured and contingent, white, black, multiracial, and other—from public and private universities across the United States. Whether describing contentious power dynamics within their classrooms or recounting protests that occurred on their campuses, the book’s contributors offer bracingly honest inside accounts of both the conflicts and the learning experiences that can emerge from being a representative of diversity. The collection’s authors are united by their commitment to an ideal of the American university as an inclusive and transformative space, one where students from all backgrounds can simultaneously feel intellectually challenged and personally supported. Yet Transforming the Academy also offers a wide range of perspectives on how to best achieve these goals, a diversity of opinion that is sure to inspire lively debate. Source: Publisherhttps://scholarworks.smith.edu/afr_books/1006/thumbnail.jp

Between Catastrophe and Carnival: Creolized Identities, Cityspace, and Life Narratives

This cluster of Life Stories from the Creole City brings together essays that focus on figures negotiating subjectivity within different creole cities at specific historical junctures, as these urban spaces become compelling sites for narrating subjectivity in negotiation with forces of globalization, diaspora, and cosmopolitanism. The essays variously illuminate the difficulties and payoffs associated with narrating lives in—and of—porous urban space