ABSTRACT

This book offers a timely intervention in current debates on diaspora and diasporic identity by affirming the importance of narrative as a discursive mode to understand the human face of contemporary migrations and dislocations. Focusing on the Caribbean double-diaspora, Pulitano offers a close-reading of a range of popular works by four well-known writers currently living in the United States: Jamaica Kincaid, Michelle Cliff, Edwidge Danticat, and Caryl Phillips. Navigating the map of fictional characters, testimonial accounts, and autobiographical experiences, Pulitano draws attention to the lived experience of contemporary diasporic formations. The book offers a provocative re-thinking of socio-scientific analyses of diaspora by discussing the embodied experience of contemporary diasporic communities, drawing on disciplines such as Caribbean, Postcolonial, Diaspora, and Indigenous Studies along with theories on "border thinking" and coloniality/modernity. Contesting restrictive, national, and linguistic boundaries when discussing literature originating from the Caribbean, Pulitano situates the transnational location of Caribbean-born writers within current debates of Transnational American Studies and investigates the role of immigrant writers in discourses of race, ethnicity, citizenship, and belonging. Exploring the multifarious intersections between home, exile, migration and displacement, the book makes a significant contribution to memory and trauma studies, human rights debates, and international law, aiming at a wide range of scholars and specialized agents beyond the strictly literary circle. This volume affirms the humanity of personal stories and experiences against the invisibility of immigrant subjects in most theoretical accounts of diaspora and migration.

chapter |22 pages

Introduction

Caribbean Diasporas and Narrated Lives

part |68 pages

Diasporic Homelands

chapter |16 pages

When Home Hurts

Edwidge Danticat's Journeys of Healing

chapter |18 pages

Absent Fathers and Crumbling Origins

Jamaica Kincaid and the (Im)possibility of Home

chapter |16 pages

“I and Jamaica is who I am”

Michelle Cliff's Ambivalent Homecomings

part |58 pages

Uprooting, Migrancy, Regrounding

chapter |20 pages

Routes, Roots, and Imaginary Nations

Jamaica Kincaid's Restless Gardens and Michelle Cliff's Dangerous Crossings

chapter |30 pages

Homines sacri

The Discourse of Refugees in Edwidge Danticat's Brother, I'm Dying and Caryl Phillips' A Distant Shore

part |74 pages

Paradise Islands, Wild Nature, and the Contemporary Tourist Gaze

chapter |16 pages

In the Land of Look Behind

Rebellion and Resistance in Michelle Cliff

chapter |14 pages

Abject Bodies, Dis/eased Selves

Jamaica Kincaid's Elegiac Song to Antigua

chapter |16 pages

Back to the Roots

Caryl Phillips' Caribbean Land(Sea)scapes

chapter |8 pages

Epilogue

Caribbean Diasporic Voices in a Post-9/11 America