Sarah Phillips Casteel

In a little-known chapter of World War II, Black people living in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe were subjected to ostracization, forced sterilization, and incarceration in internment and concentration camps. In the absence of public commemoration, African diaspora writers and artists have preserved the stories of these forgotten victims of the Third Reich. Their works illuminate the relationship between creative expression and wartime survival and the role of art in the formation of collective memory. This groundbreaking book explores a range of largely overlooked literary and artistic works that challenge the invisibility of Black wartime history. Emphasizing Black agency, Sarah Phillips Casteel examines both testimonial art by victims of the Nazi regime and creative works that imaginatively reconstruct the wartime period. Among these are the internment art of Caribbean painter Josef Nassy, the survivor memoir of Black German journalist Hans J. Massaquoi, the jazz fiction of African American novelist John A. Williams and Black Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan, and the photomontages of Scottish Ghanaian visual artist Maud Sulter. Bridging Black and Jewish studies, this book identifies the significance of African diaspora experiences and artistic expression for Holocaust history, memory, and representation.

Making History Visible in Literature and Art

Black Lives Under Nazism

Diaspora studies have tended to privilege urban landscapes over rural ones, wanting to avoid the racial homogeneity, conservatism, and xenophobia usually associated with the latter. This book examines the work of various writers to show how it expresses the appeal that rural and wilderness spaces can hold for the diasporic imagination.

Landscape and Belonging in Contemporary Writing of the Americas

Second Arrivals

Heidi Kaufman

Caribbean Jewish Crossings is the first essay collection to consider the Caribbean's relationship to Jewishness through a literary lens. Although Caribbean novelists and poets regularly incorporate Jewish motifs in their work, scholars have neglected this strain in studies of Caribbean literature. The book takes a pan-Caribbean approach, with chapters addressing the Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanophone, and Dutch-speaking Caribbean. Part 1 traces the emergence of a Caribbean-Jewish literary culture in Suriname, St. Thomas, Jamaica, and Cuba from the late eighteenth century through the early twentieth century. Part 2 brings into focus Sephardic and crypto-Jewish motifs in contemporary Caribbean literature, while Part 3 turns to the question of colonialism and its relationship to Holocaust memory. The volume concludes with the compelling voices of contemporary Caribbean creative writers.

Literary History and Creative Practice

Caribbean Jewish Crossings

Winfried Siemerling

The chapters in this volume, a groundbreaking work in the burgeoning field of hemispheric American studies, expand the horizons of Canadian and Québécois literatures, suggest alternative approaches to models centred on the United States, and analyze the risks and benefits of hemispheric approaches to Canada and Quebec. Revealing the connections among a broad range of Canadian, Québécois, American, Caribbean, Latin American, and diasporic literatures, the contributors critique the neglect of Canadian works in Hemispheric studies and show how such writing can be successfully integrated into an emerging area of literary inquiry. An important development in understanding the diversity of literatures throughout the western hemisphere, Canada and Its Americas reveals exciting new ways for thinking about transnationalism, regionalism, border cultures, and the literatures they produce.

Transnational Navigations

Canada & Its Americas

In the last few decades Canadian and Québécois literatures have been catapulted onto the global stage, gaining international readership and recognition. Canada and Its Americas challenges the convention that study of this literature should be limited to its place within national borders, arguing that these works should be examined from the perspective of their place and influence within the Americas as a whole. The essays in this volume, a groundbreaking work in the burgeoning field of hemispheric American studies, expand the horizons of Canadian and Québécois literatures, suggest alternative approaches to models centred on the United States, and analyse the risks and benefits of hemispheric approaches to Canada and Quebec. Revealing the connections among a broad range of Canadian, Québécois, American, Caribbean, Latin American, and diasporic literatures, the contributors critique the neglect of Canadian works in Hemispheric studies and show how such writing can be successfully integrated into an emerging area of literary inquiry.

In original and insightful ways, Caribbean writers have turned to Jewish experiences of exodus and reinvention, from the Sephardim expelled from Iberia in the 1490s to the "Calypso Jews" who fled Europe for Trinidad in the 1930s. Examining these historical migrations through the lens of postwar Caribbean fiction and poetry, Sarah Phillips Casteel presents the first major study of representations of Jewishness in Caribbean literature. Bridging the gap between postcolonial and Jewish studies, Calypso Jews enriches cross-cultural investigations of Caribbean creolization. Caribbean writers invoke both the 1492 expulsion and the Holocaust as part of their literary archaeology of slavery and its legacies. Despite the unequal and sometimes fraught relations between Blacks and Jews in the Caribbean before and after emancipation, Black-Jewish literary encounters reflect sympathy and identification more than antagonism and competition. Providing an alternative to U.S.-based critical narratives of Black-Jewish relations, Casteel reads Derek Walcott, Maryse Condé, Michelle Cliff, Jamaica Kincaid, Caryl Phillips, David Dabydeen, and Paul Gilroy, among others, to reveal a distinctive interdiasporic literature.

Sarah Phillips Casteel

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