Latina and
Latino Voices
in Literature :
Lives and Works Updated and Expanded
by Frances Ann Day
Published: Revised and Updated edition 2003

Book Description: This revised edition of an award-winning resource celebrates the lives and works of 35 Latina and Latino authors who write for today's young readers. Expanded to include 12 additional authors, updated information on the original 23 authors profiled, and 135 new titles, this comprehensive reference tool helps teachers, librarians, and parents stay current on one of the most dynamic areas of contemporary literature.

The Whistling Bird:
Women Writers
of the Caribbean
Editors: Elaine Campbell, Pierrette Frickey
Published: 1998

Caribbean
Women Writers
(Women Writers
of English and Their Works)(Cloth)
Editor: Harold Bloom
Published: 1997

Card catalog description: The past few decades have seen an explosion of writing by women from the Caribbean. From Antigua, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Trinidad - women of African, European, and mixed ancestry have explored and manipulated their complex matrix: of languages and subtle linguistic codes; of folk traditions and formal English schooling; of vital politics and tormented histories; of intoxicating natural beauty and devastating poverty.

They have written of mothertongues and motherlands, of exile, of the boundaries of bodies, of the politics of owning and not owning themselves. Though worlds apart, writings as diverse as Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, published in 1966, and Jamaica Kincaid's Autobiography of My Mother, published 30 years later, nevertheless share a setting of shocking yet sinister beauty; a sense of the loss of a mother and the implications of this loss upon one's self; and a deeply resonant literary heritage.

From Guyana's Beryl Gilroy to Haiti's Edwidge Danticat, Caribbean women are mingling the political with the lyrical in a quickly deepening new body of literature

The Second
Shipwreck:
A Study of Indo-Caribbean Literature
by Jeremy Poynting
Published: 2003

Book Description: The Second Shipwreck has a four-part structure. Part one deals with the historical and cultural resources of Indo-Caribbean writing. Part two focuses on the literary responses to separation from India, and argues that it is possible to identify survivals and transformations of a Hindu worldview. Part three looks at literary explorations of the increasing diversity within the Indo-Caribbean communities, using images of place as stages in an historical journey, which now includes the settlement of diasporic communities in North America and Britain.

It also examines issues of gender, and particularly the emergence of Indo-Caribbean women's writing. The final part deals with how imaginative writing has portrayed the problematic relationships between Indians and their African-Caribbean neighbors.

Indo-Caribbean studies is a rapidly expanding area within the field of Caribbean studies. This title will be of interest not only to those concerned with literature but also to those concerned with more general historical and cultural approaches.

Author: Jeremy Poynting is widely acknowledged as an expert in this field - as founder and managing editor of Peepal Tree Press he has been the publisher of over 140 Caribbean literary titles. He was awarded a Ph.D. for the thesis on which this book is based. He has published numerous articles on aspects of Caribbean writing.

The Maroon
Narrative:
Caribbean Literature
in English Across Boundaries, Ethnicities, and Centuries
(Studies in Caribbean Literature)
by Cynthia James
Published: 2002

Synopsis: Systematically examines literary representations of the Caribbean in English from the 17th century to the present and traces the persistence of literary conventions in these works.

Caribbean literature is usually conceptualized in regional, thematic, and post-independence ideological terms. But in addition to Caribbean literature written in English, there is a large body of earlier English literature written about the Caribbean. This book analyzes the concept of the maroon to provide a better understanding of Caribbean literature.

In pursuit of a more comprehensive view of Caribbean literature, it examines literary representations of the Caribbean in English since the earliest fiction of the 17th century. In doing so, it traces the persistence and accretion of literary conventions in these works. Since the novel is the main Caribbean narrative genre, this study focuses on the novel though it also refers to other literary forms.

The book begins with an analysis of existing descriptions of Caribbean literature, current literary maroon theory, and a conceptualization of the maroon paradigm. It then studies the appearance of literary conventions in early modern representations of the Caribbean, such as The Tempest. The volume then looks at 19th-century narratives and their predominant feature, the culture of abandonment. The rest of the book discusses 20th-century Caribbean literature, the dialogic relationship between modern and early modern works, and the contribution of women writers to the progression of the Caribbean narrative at the close of the 20th century.

Dance
Between
Two Cultures:
Latino Caribbean Literature Written in the United States
by William Luis
Published: 2001

Book Description: In this groundbreaking study, William Luis analyzes the most salient and representative narrative and poetic works of the newest literary movement to emerge in Spanish American and U.S. literatures.

The book is divided into three sections, each focused on representative Puerto Rican American, Cuban American, and Dominican American authors. Luis traces the writers' origins and influences from the nineteenth century to the present, focusing especially on the contemporary works of Oscar Hijuelos, Julia Alvarez, Cristina Garcia, and Piri Thomas, among others. While engaging in close readings of the texts, Luis places them in a broader social, historical, political, and racial perspective to expose the tension between text and context.

As a group, Latino Caribbeans write an ethnic literature in English that is born of their struggle to forge an identity separate from both the influences of their parents' culture and those of the United States. For these writers, their parents' country of origin is a distant memory. They have developed a culture of resistance and a language that mediates between their parents' identity and the culture that they themselves live in.

Latino Caribbeans are engaged in a metaphorical dance with Anglo Americans as the dominant culture. Just as that dance represents a coming together of separate influences to make a unique art form, so do both Hispanic and North American cultures combine to bring a new literature into being. This new body of literature helps us to understand not only the adjustments Latino Caribbean cultures have had to make within the larger U.S. environment but also how the dominant culture has been affected by their presence.

Author: William Luis is widely regarded as a leading authority on Latin American, Caribbean, Afro-Hispanic, and Latino U.S. literatures is and the author of several works, including Literary Bondage: Slavery in Cuban Narrative (1990).