Caribbean Without Borders Fuentes, Gabriel J. Jiménez; Haynes, Marisol Joseph; González, Gabriel Mejía
2015, 2015-09-04
eBook
One of the most salient issues in Caribbean studies is the region's linguistic and cultural fragmentation as a result of European colonization. More than five centuries later, the islands and ...American countries whose shores touch the Caribbean Sea still echo such maladies. The title of this book is a call towards unity, a unity that, in the words of Barbadian poet, historian and critic Kamau Brathwaite, "is submarine." In the past, nations' borders were established based on the distance a cannon ball was able to cover when fired from land out to sea. It is time to go beyond the cannon ball distances out into uncharted territories, beyond the canon, and, thus, beyond the cannon's range. This book features a selection of essays presented at the fifth annual Caribbean Without Borders conference at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. It critically delves into the fields of linguistics, history, literature, philosophy, politics, feminism, cultural studies, music, film, and art, among many others, as a means to re-visit, re-view, re-envision, re-read, re-interpret, and thus re-create a Caribbean aesthetics that looks to submarine unity, a unity that defies spatial, temporal, and social borders. The book conveys the limitless nature of the Caribbean and its rich culture, making it an appealing transdisciplinary source for a multidisciplinary academic audience.
The goal of this project is to read Omeros anti-dialectically, through a tidalectic between the land, the sea, and the beach as a means of restoring the poem to its original intent: a nation-making ...narrative for the Caribbean people that merges nature and culture. The tidalectic is conceived of as a tidal dialectic between the land, the sea, and the beach in which the land embodies the hypothesis, the sea the antithesis, and the beach the synthesis. Because the beach serves as the synthesizing locus for a Caribbean poetics of beginnings in Omeros I am adapting Kamau Brathwaite’s neologism of the tidalectic to re-name the threefold relation between these natural spaces as opposed to Hegel’s dialectic, which would abrogate the spirit and intention of a Caribbean nation-making poem. The use of the tidalectic is redefined as a poetic allusion to Walcott’s Adamic act of re-naming and as a cue to the overall aim of this undertaking, which is to re-view Omeros through first and foremost a rebuttal of the very name that has kept it a Caribbean outpost of the very world it wishes to expel.
The memoir is a genre that still remains somewhat in the shadows in terms of its allocation within the subjects of academia, literature, English instruction, among others. This thesis is an attempt ...at appeasing the genre via three seemingly different, yet similar routes. First, by creating a new definition for memoir. Second, by putting into practice the theory behind memory writing through the creation of the memoir titled Lejos de la casa y el árbol . Lastly, by deciphering its role in English instruction. This thesis thus serves as a means to bridge the great divide between memoir's unstable reputation and its true colors in the fields of literature, academia and language instruction.
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