The Caribbean Postcolonial Social Equality, Post/nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity

What is the relationship of cultural hybridity to social equality? Why have some forms of hybridity been enshrined in the Caribbean imagination, and others disavowed? What is the appeal of cultural hybridity to nationalist and post-nationalist projects alike? What can we learn from the hybridization of Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean cultures set in motion by slavery and indentured servitude? In answering these questions, this book intervenes in several important debates in postcolonial studies about cultural resistance and popular agency, feminism and cultural nationalism, the relations between postmodernism and postcolonialism, and the status of nationalism in an age of globalization.

Shalini Puri is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, where she works on Caribbean and postcolonial literary and cultural studies. She is contributing editor of the interdisciplinary anthology Marginal Migrations: The Circulation of Cultures Within the Caribbean (2003).

Introduction * Part I: Critique and Methodology * Theorizing Hybridity: The Post-Nationalist Moment * Theorizing Hybridity: Caribbean Nationalisms * Part II: Alternatives and Aesthetics * Manifestos of Desire: Hybridity as Forced Poetics * Beyond Resistance: Rehearsing Oppositional Agency in Derek Walcott's Pantomime * Marvelous Realism, Feminism, and Mulatto Aesthetics: Erna Brodber's Myal * East Indian/West Indian: Racial Stereotype, Hosay, and the Politics of National Space * Facing the Music: Gender, Race, and a Dougla Poetics * Works Cited
Introduction * Part I: Critique and Methodology * Theorizing Hybridity: The Post-Nationalist Moment * Theorizing Hybridity: Caribbean Nationalisms * Part II: Alternatives and Aesthetics * Manifestos of Desire: Hybridity as Forced Poetics * Beyond Resistance: Rehearsing Oppositional Agency in Derek Walcott's Pantomime * Marvelous Realism, Feminism, and Mulatto Aesthetics: Erna Brodber's Myal * East Indian/West Indian: Racial Stereotype, Hosay, and the Politics of National Space * Facing the Music: Gender, Race, and a Dougla Poetics * Works Cited