
A Caribbean Poetics of Spirit
Hannah Regis(Author)
University of the West Indies Press
Published on 1. March 2024
Book
Paperback/Softback
240 pages
978-976-640-945-6 (ISBN)
Description
A Caribbean Poetics of Spirit offers a rare and penetrative exploration into Caribbean literary articulations of non-material and numinous presences. The study incorporates representations of African-Caribbean and Indigenous mythologies, syncretic spirituality, and magico-religious practices. From texts by ten writers, Hannah Regis extracts thematic and poetic references to Caribbean spectrality, its formal properties, and signifying practices to probe the nature and fictional representations of historical futures. Regis links the haunting spectrality of the Middle Passage with the lingering trauma and violence of the plantation order. She then raises the issue of how the latter has impacted complex ontological schema and considers how literary engagement with spirits operates as therapeutic interventions to psychic maladies, and as a potential model for a Caribbean aesthetic. This book also boldly re-conceptualizes ontological and epistemological approaches to contest colonial and neocolonial hegemonic ways of being. It provides a comprehensive taxonomy of Caribbean creative and intellectual practices, and theories for effectively categorizing and explaining the emergence and workings of spirit presences. Regis combines diverse theoretical perspectives from a range of scholars working within the traditions of postmemory, cultural memory, spirituality and Caribbean philosophy to formulate a crucial counter-archival history through which the voices of the oppressed find articulation and belonging while indexing a repository of cultural, psychological and affective expressions that are linked to the unfinished business of history. The writer adroitly contends that a Caribbean poetics of spirit sits at the edge of a new wave of literary criticism.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Kingston
Jamaica
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (UK-A)
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 15 mm
Weight
396 gr
ISBN-13
978-976-640-945-6 (9789766409456)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Hannah Regis is an Assistant Professor of Caribbean Literature at Howard University. Her research interests include Caribbean poetics, Caribbean literary and theoretical history, Caribbean spectrality, counter-archival engagements, reparative writing, theories of embodiment and cultural memory.
Content
Acknowledgements
1 Anchoring Spiritual Memory in the Pre- and Post-Atlantic Caribbean World
2 Indigenous Cosmovisions and Postmemory in the Fictions of Wilson Harris
3 Haunted Histories: Spectres of the Middle Passage in M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong! and Grace Nichols's I is a Long Memoried Woman
4 Re-Architecting Freedom: Myth, Ancestors and Ritual in George Lamming's Season of Adventure and Erna Brodber's The Rainmaker's Mistake
5 Writing the Absent Presences: Locating Discourses of the Unspeakable
6 Tracking Signposts to a Caribbean Poetics of Spirit in Wilson Harris's Arawak Horizon and Derek Walcott's Omeros
Afterword
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
1 Anchoring Spiritual Memory in the Pre- and Post-Atlantic Caribbean World
2 Indigenous Cosmovisions and Postmemory in the Fictions of Wilson Harris
3 Haunted Histories: Spectres of the Middle Passage in M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong! and Grace Nichols's I is a Long Memoried Woman
4 Re-Architecting Freedom: Myth, Ancestors and Ritual in George Lamming's Season of Adventure and Erna Brodber's The Rainmaker's Mistake
5 Writing the Absent Presences: Locating Discourses of the Unspeakable
6 Tracking Signposts to a Caribbean Poetics of Spirit in Wilson Harris's Arawak Horizon and Derek Walcott's Omeros
Afterword
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography