
Caribbean Ghostwriting
Erica L. Johnson(Author)
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
Published on 1. October 2009
Book
Hardback
152 pages
978-1-61147-426-8 (ISBN)
Description
Caribbean Ghostwriting addresses a question central to the fields of postcolonial, feminist, and African diasporic studies:how are we to know the colonial past when the lives of colonized and enslaved people were largely written out of history? Caribbean authors Michelle Cliff, Maryse Conde, and Dionne Brand address the silences and gaps of historiography by fleshing out overlooked historical figures in literary form. These authors do not simply reconstruct lost lives, but rather they foreground the tension between the real, material traces of peoples lives and the fact of their erasure. In novels that are at once historical, biographical, and artistic, they portray real but sparsely documented and therefore haunting histories through a strategy identifiable as ghostwriting. Erica L. Johnson defines ghostwriting as an important genre of Caribbean literature through which authors literally ghostwrite stories for lost historical figures even while they poetically preserve the unspeakable nature of the archival lacunae their novels engage.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Cranbury
United States
Publishing group
Associated University Presses
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Laminated cover
Dimensions
Height: 246 mm
Width: 165 mm
Thickness: 6 mm
Weight
106 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-61147-426-8 (9781611474268)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Erica L. Johnson teaches world literature at Wagner College.