Cuba: Reading and Revolution-Cuban Literature and Literary Culture

Examines postcolonial literature and literary culture in India, Nigeria, the UK, and Cuba, attending to what reading means and the importance of local literary marketplaces in postcolonial and neocolonial culture. Drawing on spatial theory, Ramone explores the representation of reading, both spaces and places, found in post-Revolutionary Cuban literature, including Leonardo Padura\u27s 2005 crime novel, Adios, Hemingway, in which Hemingway is a murder suspect. Analyzes Padura\u27s use of Hemingway\u27s public persona and repetition, including repeated reading of Big Two-Hearted River, to emphasize Hemingway the writer over Hemingway the celebrity. Ramone concludes that such focus on a more authentic version of Hemingway in turn draws attention to the dual representation of Cuba, and its changing relationship with global trade and tourism

Reimagining Caribbean Time and Space: Speculative Fiction

peer reviewe

Life writing, gender and Caribbean narrative 1970-2015: itinerant self-making in the postcolonial Caribbean

This chapter argues that contemporary Caribbean women exploit the malleability of life-writing as a genre in a variety of ways that recognize the precariousness of life-making and self-making in the post-plantation Caribbean. While each of the writers discussed here critically refashions life-narrative for their own distinct purposes, they frequently share an interest in filtering personal life experiences through familiar familial and regional histories to emphasize the imbrication of the personal and political. Narrating life-stories is presented in these texts as inextricably linked to the difficult cultural politics of self-making that is so powerfully evidenced from The History of Mary Prince through to the present. While life-writing remains haunted by the region’s violent history, Caribbean women writers continue to excavate that history in order to record, affirm, rescue, restore and celebrate self and life-making possibilities, however fragmented, precarious or itinerant

Digital Yards: Caribbean Writing on Social Media and Other Digital Platforms

The globalizing and interconnecting effects of technology in the twenty-first century have had a crucial impact on the development of Caribbean literary culture and the reconfiguration of its audiences. Caribbean writing and literary criticism are reaching wider audiences within the region and beyond via myriad digital platforms. Through social media, blogs, online journals, digital archives and the websites of publishing houses and festivals, the news and content of Caribbean literary work has become more accessible. Examining networks of ‘digital yards’, a concept built on Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s work, this essay surveys twenty-first century forms of digital Caribbean literary production while considering the continuities that remain between earlier forms of representation and Caribbean literary culture online today