The Other America - Caribbean Literature in a New World Context (Hardcover)

The Other America is a wide-ranging work that explores two centuries of Caribbean literature from a comparative perspective. It is unique in its examination of the major English, French, and Spanish-speaking writers and aesthetic movements of the Caribbean, as well as in its hypothesis that the defining characteristic of Caribbean literature is its response to the fictive space of the New World. J. Michael Dash traces a Caribbean literary tradition from the Haitian Revolution to the creolist writers of present-day Martinique, relating this tradition to the problematic cultural desire for a sense of origin.

Applying Edouard Glissant's notion of a hemispheric identity, Dash argues that previous linguistic, ethnocentric, or national categorizations of Caribbean literature -- by concentrating on the ideal of resistance -- have ignored the inescapably modern, global, and historical nature of the region. While haunted by the need to establish cultural difference and authenticity, Caribbean thought is inherently modernist in its recognition of the interplay between cultures brought about by centuries of contact, domination, and consent. The body of Caribbean writing is thus privileged as an arena of conflict and convergence.

The Other America engages the work of writers such as Derek Walcott, Alejo Carpentier, Jacques Stephen Alexis, Marie Chauvet, Aime Cesaire, and Maryse Conde, among others, against the restlessness of modernist thought. Dash both advocates a new theory of Caribbean literature and argues for the importance of New World studies in developing an all-inclusive conception of the literature of the Americas.