Description
Book Synopsis‘American Tropics’ refers to a kind of extended Caribbean, an area that includes the southern USA, the Atlantic littoral of Central America, the Caribbean islands, and northern South America. European colonial powers fought intensively here against indigenous populations and against each other for control of land and resources. The regions in the American Tropics share a history in which the dominant fact is the arrival of millions of white Europeans and black Africans; share an environment that is tropical or sub-tropical; and share a socio-economic model (the plantation), whose effects lasted at least well into the twentieth century.The imaginative space of the American Tropics therefore offers a differently centred literary history from those conventionally produced as US, Caribbean, or Latin American literature. This important collection brings together essays by distinguished scholars, including the late Neil Whitehead, Richard Price, Sally Price, and Susan Gillman, that engage with the idea of a literary geography of the American Tropics and that represent the rich diversity of the writing produced within this geographical area.
Trade ReviewThese essays specifically deal with the establishment of a literary geography of the region.
New LiteraturesSurveying the American Tropics offers a trove of intellectual riches. It is rare to find a collection in which each essay engages readers in so many challenging and satisfying ways.
Vera Kutzinski, New West Indian Guide
Table of Contents
- List of illustrations
- Introduction - Maria Cristina Fumagalli, Peter Hulme, Owen Robinson, Lesley Wylie
- A Tree Grows in Bajan Brooklyn: Writing Caribbean New York - Martha Jane Nadell
- Reading the Novum World: The Literary Geography of Science Fiction in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - María del Pilar Blanco
- Inventing Tropicality: Writing Fever, Writing Trauma in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead - Hsinya Huang
- Imperial Archaeology: The American Isthmus as Contested Scientific Contact Zone - Gesa Mackenthun
- Space Age Tropics - Mimi Sheller
- Black Jacobins and New World Mediterraneans: Spectres of Comparison? - Susan Gillman
- The Oloffson - Alasdair Pettinger
- Dark Thresholds in Trinidad: Regarding the Colonial House - Jak Peake
- Micronations of the Caribbean - Russell McDougall
- Golden Kings, Cocaine Lords, and the Madness of El Dorado: Guayana as Native and Colonial Imaginary - Neil L. Whitehead
- Suriname Literary Geography: The Changing Same - Richard Price and Sally Price
- The Art of Observation: Race and Landscape in A Journey in Brazil - Nina Gerassi-Navarro
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
