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This book is about a distinctive 'abyssal' approach to the crisis of modernity. In this framing, influenced by contemporary critical Black studies, another understanding of the world of modernity is foregrounded - a world violently forged through the projects of Indigenous dispossession, chattel slavery and colonial world-making. Modern and colonial world-making violently forged the 'human' by dividing those with ontological security from those without, and by carving out the 'world' in a fixed grid of space and time, delineating a linear temporality of 'progress' and 'development'. The distinctiveness of abyssal thought is that it inverts the stakes of critique and brings indeterminacy into the heart of ontological assumptions of a world of entities, essences, and universal determination. This is an approach that does not focus upon tropes of rescue and salvation but upon the generative power of negation. In doing so, it highlights how Caribbean experiences and writings have been drawn upon to provide an important and distinct perspective for critical thought. "How is it that ontology has come to be seen as the antidote for modernity? While Foucault denigrated ontology as a mistaken and parochial exercise, contemporary social theory holds out the promise that new modes of planetary knowledge will save us from our own excesses. Drawing together long traditions in Caribbean scholarship with Afro-pessimist thought, Pugh and Chandler illustrate how the search for more emancipatory ontologies - relational ontologies, indigenous ontologies, non-human ontologies, etc. - not only misunderstands the problem of modernity but (more importantly) works to veil the negative force that marks both the limit and cause of all such knowledge practices: what they term the abyss. To engage in abyssal thought - as they lay out - is to inhabit a site of refusal: a determination not to be drawn into the lure of ontological 'correction' and to recognise that the practice of world making cannot not bear the imprint of colonial violence. Articulated in passionate declarative prose, these authors powerfully illuminate the trap of the emancipatory instinct and the promise of a deconstructive ethic." - Mitch Rose, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, Aberystwyth University, UK "A much-needed intellectual effort in the non-reductionist and non-essentialising style of Pugh and Chandler's previous book. The World as Abyss gives Caribbean thought and culture the place they deserve within critical theory and materialist studies." - Mónica Fernández Jiménez, Valladolid University, Spain "For some time now scholars have questioned the overly general assumptions about the 'anthropos' of the Anthropocene, but much work needs to be done to flesh out what a decolonized Anthropocene might be. Pugh and Chandler's The World as Abyss provides an original, intriguing and compelling counterpoint to bland Anthropocene humanism (and posthumanism). This timely work explores the poetics of the Caribbean and provides a way to think about the Anthropocene and the future beyond the managerialism of the present. This book is essential reading for those working in the environmental humanities or Anthropocene studies." - Claire Colebrook, Professor, Penn State University, USA "This book names an apocalypse that began long ago. Pugh and Chandler patiently follow the journey of thought as it travels from the Middle Passage to the Caribbean. This brings them face-to-face with the horror of anti-Black violence, not as just another resource to strip-mine, but as an unavoidable abyss that confines all thought. Its reminder: that we have still not yet begun to think a truly Black world." - Andrew Culp, Professor, California Institute of the Arts, USA "With the force of a manifesto, the intensity of a polemic, and the nuance of a treatise, this book sets out to disavow the disavowal of Colonial violence in the making of the contemporary world and thought. Learning from Caribbean thinkers, writers, and poets, it sets to work unworking, desedimenting and deconstructing, the violent ontological foundations by which anti-Black worlds maintain and reproduce their innocence and ignorance. Replaying and reiterating, extending and multiplying, gestures of refusal - refusals of subjection, of History, of Geography, of meaning, of Being - there is the refusal of the World as it is and of the World as it could be. The World as Abyss artfully combines a critique of the historical forces which make and unmake the contemporary moment with the suspension of horizons, of ends, of grounds. What emerges in the wake is an intensification of the generative capacity of this refusal; voids, arrhythmia, counter-times, displacements, dislocations, the abyssal. First as threat and then as promise" - Paul Harrison, Associate Professor of Human Geography, Durham University, UK.

Caribbean literature (English)

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The first book-length study of gossip's place in the literature of the multilingual Caribbean reveals gossip to be a utilitarian and deeply political practice-a means of staging the narrative tensions, and waging the narrative battles, that mark Caribbean politics and culture. Revising the overly gendered existing critical frame, Rodríguez Navas argues that gossip is a fundamentally adversarial practice that at once surveils identities and empowers writers to skirt sanitized, monolithic historical accounts by weaving alternative versions of their nations' histories from this self-governing discursive material. Reading recent fiction from the Hispanic, Anglophone, and Francophone Caribbean and their diasporas, alongside poetry, song lyrics, journalism, memoirs, and political essays, Idle Talk, Deadly Talk maps gossip's place in the Caribbean and reveals its rich possibilities as both literary theme and narrative device.

Caribbean literature --- Gossip in literature. --- History and criticism.

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"Figueroa-Vásquez analyzes Afro-Latinx and Afro-Hispanic artists from Equatorial Guinea, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba, revealing the thematic, conceptual, and liberatory tools these artists offer when read in relation to one another"--

Caribbean literature (Spanish) --- Equatorial Guinean literature (Spanish) --- African diaspora in literature --- Postcolonialism in literature --- Spanish literature --- Equatorial Guinean literature --- Caribbean literature --- History and criticism --- Postcolonialism in literature. --- African diaspora in literature. --- History and criticism.

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This collection offers a follow up to the first collection of essays Revisiting Slave Narratives / Les Avatars des récits d’esclaves (2005), whose purpose was to bring together African-merican and Caribbean neo-slave novels. In 2007, the year of the bicentennial anniversary of the official abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in the British colonial Empire, the memorialisation and commemoration events should not obliterate the fact that, through the prison of slave narratives and neo-slave novels, it is our present that is at stake. In order to show how our societies and minds still need to be manumitted, the essays in this collection examine books of fiction by André Brink, Octavia Butler, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Cristina Garcia, Edward P. Jones, Paule Marshall, Phyllis Perry, Susan Straight, and books of non-fiction by Malcom X or John Edgar Wideman ; as well as works by poets like Fred D’Aguiar or Marilyn Nelson, by playwrights like Robbie Mc Cauley, Derek Walcott or August Wilson, and by visual artists like David Boxer, Christopher Cozier, Glenn Ligon, or Kara Walker. Ce recueil propose une suite au premier recueil d’articles Revisiting Slave Narratives · Les avatars contemporains des récits d’esclaves (2005) dont le but était de rapprocher les écrivains afro-américains et caribéens qui revisitent la littérature de l’esclavage. En cette année 2007, bicentenaire de l’abolition de la traite dans l’empire britannique, c’est dans son rapport à notre présent que le travail de mémoire doit continuer d’être effectué. De façon à montrer à quel point la relecture de ce passé de l’esclavage est encore nécessaire pour libérer les sociétés et les esprits, les articles de cette collection analysent des œuvres de fiction d’André Brink, Octavia Butler, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Cristina Garcia, Edward P. Jones, Paule Marshall, Phyllis Perry, Susan Straight, et des œuvres de non-fiction de Malcolm X ou John Edgar Wideman ; ainsi que l’œuvre de poètes comme Fred D’Aguiar ou…

Literature --- esclavage --- postcolonial --- récit d’esclave --- littérature Caraïbe --- abolition --- Afro-Américain --- slavery --- slave narrative --- Caribbean literature --- African-American

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In Simon Gikandi's view, Caribbean literature and postcolonial literature more generally negotiate an uneasy relationship with the concepts of modernism and modernity-a relationship in which the Caribbean writer, unable to escape a history encoded by Europe, accepts the challenge of rewriting it. Drawing on contemporary deconstructionist theory, Gikandi looks at how such Caribbean writers as George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, Alejo Carpentier, C. L. R. James, Paule Marshall, Merle Hodge, Zee Edgell, and Michelle Cliff have attempted to confront European modernism.

Caribbean fiction (English) --- West Indian fiction (English) --- Modernism (Literature) --- History and criticism. --- Carpentier, Alejo, --- Crepuscolarismo --- Literary movements --- Postmodernism (Literature) --- English fiction --- Caribbean literature (English) --- West Indian literature (English) --- West Indian authors --- Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000