Jana Evans Braziel

Kathleen LeBesco

Fatness and Transgression

Bodies Out of Bounds

An Introduction

Diaspora

"This is an exceptional collection—the subject is of obvious importance, yet terribly undertheorized and unexamined. I know of no other work that offers what this collection provides."—Marcia Millman, author of Such a Pretty Face: Being Fat in America ". . . A valuable contribution to scholarly debates on the place of excessive bodies in contemporary culture. This book promises to enrich all areas of inquiry related to the politics of bodies."—Carole Spitzack, author of Confessing Excess: Women and the Politics of Body Reduction "This anthology includes a wide range of perceptive and original essays, which explore and analyze the underlying ideologies that have made fat "incorrect." Echoing the spirit of the nineteenth-century adage about children who should be neither seen nor heard, some of the authors powerfully remind us that we keep "bodies out of bound" silenced and unseen-unless, of course, we need to peek at the comic or grotesque."—Raquel Salgado Scherr, co-author of Face Value: The Politics of Beauty "Through textual analyses, video/film analyses, television theory, and literary theory, this collection demonstrates the various ways in which dominant representations of fat and corpulence have been both demonized and rendered invisible. . . . This volume will be a crucial corollary to work on the tyranny of slenderness; a collection of different perspectives on the fat body is sorely missing in women's studies, communication, and media studies."—Sarah Banet-Weiser, author of The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity

Anita Mannur

Bringing together the key essays that have constituted this field since its inception and that point the way toward its future, Theorizing Diaspora is a central resource for understanding diaspora as an emergent and contested theoretical space. Anthologizes the most influential and critically received essays that have shaped the trajectory of diaspora studies. Offers classic statements that have defined the field by scholars including Appadurai, Gilroy, Radhakrishnan, and Hall. Presents divergent strains of multiple diasporas, including Chinese, Black African, Jewish, South Asian, Latin American, and Caribbean. Reflects the modalities and methodologies of scholars across the humanities and social sciences. Includes a postscript on diaspora in cyberspace and an extensive bibliography.

A Reader

Theorizing Diaspora

Joseph A. Young

Based on the Race in the Humanities conference, held in Nov. 2001 at Univ. of Wisconsin-La Crosse, La Crosse, Wisconsin.

Race, Aesthetics, and Cultural Amnesia in the Americas

Erasing Public Memory

Foregrounding street art in the capital cities of Cuba, Haiti, and Puerto Rico, this book argues that Antillean street artists diagnose the “impossible state” of the arrested present (colonized, occupied, or under dictatorship) while simultaneously imagining liberated futures and fully sovereign states. Jana Evans Braziel launches a comparative study of art, politics, history, urban street cultures, engaged citizenships, and social transformations in three Antillean capital cities—Havana, Cuba; Port-au-Prince, Haiti; and San Juan, Puerto Rico—of the Greater Caribbean. The book includes a photo documentary archive of street art, murals, and installations by key muralists in these cities: Yulier Rodriguez Pérez, "Jerry" Rosembert Moïse, and Colectivo Moriviví (Chachi González Colón, Raysa Rodríguez García, and Salomé Cortés). Braziel offers art historical and geopolitical analyses of the urban street art in their cities of production, underscoring street art as political, economic, and environmental engagements (and not as exclusively aesthetic ones) with urban space and street life. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Caribbean studies, Latin American studies, and urban studies.

Impossible States, Virtual Publics

Street Art and Activism in the Greater Caribbean

On the southern end of the Grand Rue, a major thoroughfare that runs through the center of Port-au-Prince, waits the Haitian capital's automobile repair district. This veritable junkyard of steel and rubber, recycled parts, old tires, and scrap metal might seem an unlikely foundry for art. Yet, on the street's opposite end thrives the Grand Rue Galerie, a working studio of assembled art and sculptures wrought from the refuse. Established by artists Andre Eugene and Jean Herard Celeur in the late 1990s, the Grand Rue's urban environmental aesthetics--defined by motifs of machinic urbanism, Vodou bricolage, the postprimitivist altermodern, and performative politics--radically challenge ideas about consumption, waste, and environmental hazards, as well as consider innovative solutions to these problems in the midst of poverty, insufficient social welfare, lack of access to arts, education, and basic needs. In Riding with Death, Jana Evans Braziel explores the urban environmental aesthetics of the Grand Rue sculptors and the beautifully constructed sculptures they have designed from salvaged automobile parts, rubber tires, carved wood, and other recycled materials. Through first-person accounts and fieldwork, Braziel constructs an urban ecological framework for understanding these sculptures amid environmental degradation and grinding poverty. Influenced by urban geographers, art historians, and political theorists, the book regards the underdeveloped cities of the global South as alternate spaces for challenging the profit-driven machinations of global capitalism. Above all, Braziel presents Haitian artists who live on the most challenged Caribbean island, yet who thrive as creators reinventing refuse as art and resisting the abjection of their circumstances.

Vodou Art and Urban Ecology in the Streets of Port-au-Prince

Riding with Death

Nadège T. Clitandre

Edwidge Danticat's prolific body of work has established her as one of the most important voices in 21st-century literary culture. Across such novels as Breath, Eyes, Memory, Farming the Bones and short story collections such as Krik? Krak! and most recently Everything Inside, essays, and writing for children, the Haitian-American writer has throughout her oeuvre tackled important contemporary themes including racism, imperialism, anti-immigrant politics, and sexual violence. With chapters written by leading and emerging international scholars, this is the most up-to-date and in-depth reference guide to 21st-century scholarship on Edwidge Danticat's work. The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edwidge Danticat covers such topics as: · The full range of Danticat's writing from her novels and short stories to essays, life writing and writing for children and young adults. · Major interdisciplinary scholarly perspectives including from establishing fields fields of literary studies, Caribbean Studies Political Science, Latin American Studies, feminist and gender studies, African Diaspora Studies, , and emerging fields such as Environmental Studies. · Danticat's literary sources and influences from Haitian authors such as Marie Chauvet, Jacques Roumain and Jacques-Stéphen Alexis to African American authors like Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Caribbean American writers Audre Lorde to Paule Marshall. · Known and unknown Historical moments in experiences of slavery and imperialism, the consequence of internal and external migration, and the formation of diasporic communities The book also includes a comprehensive bibliography of Danticat's work and key works of secondary criticism, and an interview with the author, as well as and essays by Danticat herself.

The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edwidge Danticat

Philosophical exploration of Jamaica Kincaid’s entire literary oeuvre.

Jamaica Kincaid and the Writing of New Worlds

Caribbean Genesis

How Haitian diaspora artists resist and refigure race, gender, and ethnic identities in American culture

Artists, Performers, and Black Masculinity in the Haitian Diaspora

Drawing on the diasporic cultural texts of several authors, such as Edwidge Danticat and Dany Laferriére, Jana Evans Braziel examines how writers participate in transnational movements for global social justice. In their fictional works they discuss the Unites States' many interventionist methods in Haiti, including surveillance, foreign aid, and military assistance.

Jana Evans Braziel

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