Caribbean Perspectives on Modernity

Taking up the challenge of redefining modernity from a Caribbeanperspective instead of assuming that the North Atlantic view of modernity isuniversal, Maria Cristina Fumagalli shows how the Caribbean's contributions to themodern world not only provide a more accurate account of the past but also have thepotential to change the way in which we imagine thefuture.Fumagalli uses the mythof Medusa's gaze turning people into stone to describe the way North Atlanticmodernity freezes its "others" into a state of perpetual backwardness that producesan ethnocentric narrative based on homogenization, vilification, and disempowermentthat actively ignores what fails to conform to the story it wants to tell aboutitself. In analyzing narratives of modernity that originate in the Caribbean, theauthor explores the region's refusal to succumb to Medusa's spell and highlights itsstrategies to outstare theGorgon.Reflecting a diversity oftexts, genres, and media, the chapters focus on sixteenth-century engravings andpaintings from the Netherlands and Italy, a scientific romance produced at the turnof the twentieth century by the king of the Caribbean island Redonda, contemporarycollections of poetry from the anglophone Caribbean, a historical novel by theGuadeloupean writer Maryse Condé, a Latin epic, a Homeric hymn, ancient Egyptianrites, fairy tales, romances from England and Jamaica, a long narrative poem by theNobel Prize winner Derek Walcott, and paintings by artists from Europe and theAmericas spanning the seventeenth century to thepresent.Caribbean Perspectives on Modernity offers anoriginal and creative contribution to what it means to bemodern.NewWorld Studies