This study examines Marshall’s use of the trope of travel within and between the United States and the Caribbean to critique ideologies of Development, tourism, and globalization as neo-imperial. ...This examination of travel in Marshall’s “To Da-Duh, In Memoriam”; The Chosen Place, The Timeless People; Praisesong for the Widow; and Daughters exposes the asymmetrical structures of power that exist between the two regions. In so doing, my study locates Marshall’s concern about the imposition of power in the post-colonial period rather than exclusively in the Caribbean’s colonial past. My close reading of these texts draws upon the vexed tradition of travel to the Caribbean including colonization, Development initiatives, tourism, and globalization. The trajectory of this study follows Marshall’s concerns about the growing influence of the United States on the Caribbean as the 20 th century unfolds. Chapter One looks at “To Da-Duh, In Memoriam” to show how a young girl’s travel to see her maternal grandmother in Barbados reveals the formidable presence of the United States as an emblem of modernity—and a potential antagonist to Barbadian sovereignty--on the eve of Barbados’ independence. Chapter Two examines the travel of Development practitioners in The Chosen Place, The Timeless People to challenge the efficacy of Development practice in the Caribbean. Chapter Three considers how Marshall uses the travel of tourism in Praisesong for the Widow to question unambiguous representations of nationalism. Chapter Four looks at the travel by a bi-national, transnational elite protagonist in Daughters to show, on one level, how Marshall ultimately recognizes the inevitability of the United States’ influence in the Caribbean, and, in turn, how she exposes the perpetuation of inequality that frames the seeming borderless-ness of globalization. By analyzing what may appear to be a rather simplistic trope of travel in Marshall’s fiction within the vexed history of human interaction through travel between the United States and the Caribbean, this study shows how Marshall locates the later 20th century encounter between the United States and the Caribbean on a continuum of hegemony against the Caribbean from colonialism to the present.
Somebody Blew off Baraka Harris, William J.; Nielsen, Aldon Lynn
African American review,
06/2003, Volume:
37, Issue:
2/3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Harris and Lynn discuss the criticism on Somebody Blew Off America by poet Amiri Baraka. Critics have stressed that Baraka is not worthy to become a poet laureate, and hope that Baraka scholarship ...will move beyond his perpetual controversies.
Clabough explores several criticisms from Gayl Jones's works of short fiction, such as White Rat and Eva's Man. In her comdemnary review of White Rat, Carol Pearson makes an important observation ...about the general tenor of Jones's imagery, arguing that, rather than attempting to establish any kind of humanistic vision, the stories "are characterized instead by unrelieved distaste for the body, for sexuality, and for human life." Although it was not the result of conscious intention, Pearson's remark suggests elements of the grotesque and could even serve as a partial definition of that important and evasive aesthetic form.
Black women are a prism through which the searing rays of race, class and sex are first focused, then refracted. The creative among us transform these rays into a spectrum of brilliant colors, a ...rainbow that illuminates the experience of all humankind. Here, Wilkerson shares how these ideas shaped the prism of her life: her identity as an African American woman, her passion for theater as a powerful means of persuasion, her commitment to help make the world a better place, and her belief that knowledge is a powerful and critical tool for living in this world.
Kelvin Monroe, a jazz pianist from middle Georgia bring in one of the great racist of the Enlightenment as he focused on language and written in the Black Studies and Comparative Ethnic Studies ...classrooms. He discusses about whiteness only as it concerns the elimination of racism and inequality in the social reality of people of color.
Kim criticizes the implication of the lines in Baraka's titles, raze/race/raise. He says that Baraka's works center historic contradictions of the black liberation movement and the tension in ...avant-garde aesthetics. Baraka's recent work represents a deep and ongoing aesthetic struggle with the historic tensions at the heart of avant-gardism.
In an interview, Honoree Fanonne Jeffers discusses what the Black Arts Movement mean for her as poet and intellectual, cultural worker. When she first entered a creative writing program, she was the ...only black poet in that program, and the kind of racial polemic established by Black Arts Movement poets was very important for her at that time.
Aretha Was The Riot Tate, Greg
Billboard,
08/2018, Volume:
130, Issue:
20
Trade Publication Article
James Brown declared himself Soul Brother Number One but the community crowned Aretha the Queen of Soul with no lobbying needed. Thatartfully militant initiative sought to align poetic aims with ...revolutionary political sentiments, and Giovanni early on demonstrated that she was as dedicated to craftand lyricism asto heryoung gifted generation's politics, On Truth Is On Its Way, her warm, understated delivery contrasts remarkably with contemporaries like The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron but is no less provocative or penetrating. Aretha doesn't have to relive Billie Holiday's life doesn't have to relive Dinah Washington's death Giovanni testified to Aretha's artistic and political power, but also empathetically recognizes that there's a real human being inside the icon, prey to marital challenges, health issues, the encroachment of scandalfocused media, business pressures and the creative maintenance of her legacy - not to mention career momentum in a world full of hungry competitors.
