The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 2017
This article recuperates the creative work of Jamaican cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter, arguing t... more This article recuperates the creative work of Jamaican cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter, arguing that her activities as a dramatist and translator constitute foundational efforts to imagine an emerging postcolonial reading public. The article considers Wynter’s heretofore-neglected adaptation of Federico García Lorca’s La Casa De Bernarda Alba. The play appears in the newly founded Jamaica Journal in 1968, alongside an essay theorizing adaptation, production, and sets. Adaptation, for Wynter, is strategy of postcolonial reading that requires careful reinterpretation, an emphasis on historicity, and sensitivity to the imperatives of theatricality. The play evidences Wynter’s concern with the politics and poetics of translation, a transformative act that exemplifies the process of indigenization theorized in her later works. Wynter transforms Lorca’s original, “transposing” it to a Jamaican setting and adding dialogue and content to craft a scathing meditation on the legacies of coloni...
At the Crossroads: African American and Caribbean Writers in the Interwar Period Imani D. Owens A... more At the Crossroads: African American and Caribbean Writers in the Interwar Period Imani D. Owens At the Crossroads: African American and Caribbean Writers in the Interwar Period charts discourses of folk culture, empire and modernity in the works of six African American and Caribbean writers. Each of the dissertation’s three sections pairs a writer from the U.S. with a writer from the Anglophone, Francophone or Spanish-speaking Caribbean: Jean Toomer and Eric Walrond; Langston Hughes and Nicolas Guillen; and Zora Neale Hurston and Jean PriceMars. I argue that these writers engage the concept of modernity precisely by turning to “imperial sites” that are conspicuously absent from dominant narratives of modern progress. With a sustained interest in the masses and vernacular culture, they turn to the remnants of the Southern plantation, the Caribbean “backwoods,” the inner city slums and other “elsewheres” presumably left behind by history. I contend that U.S. empire is a crucial frame ...
The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 2017
This article recuperates the creative work of Jamaican cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter, arguing t... more This article recuperates the creative work of Jamaican cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter, arguing that her activities as a dramatist and translator constitute foundational efforts to imagine an emerging postcolonial reading public. The article considers Wynter’s heretofore-neglected adaptation of Federico García Lorca’s La Casa De Bernarda Alba. The play appears in the newly founded Jamaica Journal in 1968, alongside an essay theorizing adaptation, production, and sets. Adaptation, for Wynter, is strategy of postcolonial reading that requires careful reinterpretation, an emphasis on historicity, and sensitivity to the imperatives of theatricality. The play evidences Wynter’s concern with the politics and poetics of translation, a transformative act that exemplifies the process of indigenization theorized in her later works. Wynter transforms Lorca’s original, “transposing” it to a Jamaican setting and adding dialogue and content to craft a scathing meditation on the legacies of coloni...
At the Crossroads: African American and Caribbean Writers in the Interwar Period Imani D. Owens A... more At the Crossroads: African American and Caribbean Writers in the Interwar Period Imani D. Owens At the Crossroads: African American and Caribbean Writers in the Interwar Period charts discourses of folk culture, empire and modernity in the works of six African American and Caribbean writers. Each of the dissertation’s three sections pairs a writer from the U.S. with a writer from the Anglophone, Francophone or Spanish-speaking Caribbean: Jean Toomer and Eric Walrond; Langston Hughes and Nicolas Guillen; and Zora Neale Hurston and Jean PriceMars. I argue that these writers engage the concept of modernity precisely by turning to “imperial sites” that are conspicuously absent from dominant narratives of modern progress. With a sustained interest in the masses and vernacular culture, they turn to the remnants of the Southern plantation, the Caribbean “backwoods,” the inner city slums and other “elsewheres” presumably left behind by history. I contend that U.S. empire is a crucial frame ...
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