The Cyborg Caribbean

The Cyborg Caribbean
Author: Samuel Ginsburg
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 109
Release: 2023-08-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1978836236

Download The Cyborg Caribbean Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

The Cyborg Caribbean examines a wide range of twenty-first-century Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican science fiction texts, arguing that authors from Pedro Cabiya, Alexandra Pagan-Velez, and Vagabond Beaumont to Yasmin Silvia Portales, Erick Mota, and Yoss, Haris Durrani, and Rita Indiana Hernandez, among others, negotiate rhetorical legacies of historical techno-colonialism and techno-authoritarianism. The authors span the Hispanic Caribbean and their respective diasporas, reflecting how science fiction as a genre has the ability to manipulate political borders. As both a literary and historical study, the book traces four different technologies—electroconvulsive therapy, nuclear weapons, space exploration, and digital avatars—that have transformed understandings of corporality and humanity in the Caribbean. By recognizing the ways that increased technology may amplify the marginalization of bodies based on race, gender, sexuality, and other factors, the science fiction texts studied in this book challenge oppressive narratives that link technological and sociopolitical progress. .

The Cyborg Caribbean

The Cyborg Caribbean
Author: Samuel Ellis Ginsburg
Publisher:
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2018
Genre:
ISBN:

Download The Cyborg Caribbean Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

While the genre of science fiction has origins in European and North American colonizing fantasies, many Caribbean authors are now imagining future worlds that highlight or challenge both historical and present oppressions. Many of these texts describe futuristic machines as a way to underline the historical connection between technology and the domination of marginalized bodies. In this project, I examine various 21st-century Cuban, Dominican and Puerto Rican science fiction texts, looking at how each author manipulates the genre to contest transhumanist, neoliberal narratives that link technological and social progress. Instead, these texts opt for a posthumanist understanding of hypertechnology that seeks the blurred line between body and machine as an opportunity for destabilizing normative binaries while recognizing the ways in which increased technology may amplify the marginalization of certain bodies based on race, gender, sexuality and other factors. As both a historical and literary study, this project seeks to trace the legacies of techno-colonialism and techno-authoritarianism. Each chapter in this dissertation is organized around a specific technological advancement that has challenged the conceptualization of corporeality in the Caribbean: electroshock or electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), nuclear weapons, and the digital avatars. In Chapter 1, texts by Pedro Cabiya, Alexandra Pagán-Vélez and Vagabond Beaumont represent ECT abuse in ways that show the manipulation of narratives of health and science in order to justify state torture. Chapter 2 analyzes works by Rey Emmanuel Andújar, Yasmín Silvia Portales, and Erick Mota to explore the textual nature of nuclear power and the ways that nuclear rhetoric challenges acts of remembrance and mourning. In Chapter 3, texts by Maielis González Fernández, Jorge Enrique Lage, and Rita Indiana Hernández demonstrate the ways social inequalities may be amplified in digital worlds, along with the role that avatars can play in reshaping cyberspace. The goal of this dissertation is to show how Caribbean science fiction can be used to highlight and contest the rhetorical and social legacies of techno-dominance, while mapping out possible resistances for the future

Buyers Beware

Buyers Beware
Author: Patricia Joan Saunders
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2022-05-13
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0813571227

Download Buyers Beware Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Buyers Beware treats Caribbean pop cultural texts with the same critical attention as dominant mass cultural representations of the region to read them against the grain and consider how, and whether, their "pulp" preoccupation with contemporary fashion, music, sex, fast food, and television, is instructive for how race, class, gender, sexuality, and national politics are disseminated and consumed within the Caribbean.

Dreams of Archives Unfolded

Dreams of Archives Unfolded
Author: Jocelyn Fenton Stitt
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2021-06-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1978806566

Download Dreams of Archives Unfolded Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

The first book on pan-Caribbean life writing, Dreams of Archives Unfolded reveals the innovative formal practices used to write about historical absences within contemporary personal narratives. Although the premier genres of writing postcoloniality in the Caribbean have been understood to be fiction and poetry, established figures such as Erna Brodber, Maryse Condé, Lorna Goodison, Edwidge Danticat, Saidiya Hartmann, Ruth Behar, and Dionne Brand and emerging writers such as Yvonne Shorter Brown, and Gaiutra Bahadur use life writing to question the relationship between the past and the present. Stitt theorizes that the remarkable flowering of life writing by Caribbean women since 2000 is not an imitation of the “memoir boom” in North America and Europe; instead, it marks a different use of the genre born out of encountering gendered absences in archives and ancestral memory that cannot be filled with more research. Dreams of Archives makes a significant contribution to studies of Caribbean literature by demonstrating that women’s autobiographical narratives published in the past twenty years are feminist epistemological projects that rework Caribbean studies’ longstanding commitment to creating counter-archives.

Ragamuffin

Ragamuffin
Author: Tobias S. Buckell
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2008-06-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780765354105

Download Ragamuffin Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

“First-class space adventure, with tip-top characterization, action, and world-building.”—Booklist on Ragamuffin

The Struggle of Non-Sovereign Caribbean Territories

The Struggle of Non-Sovereign Caribbean Territories
Author: H. Adlai Murdoch
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2021-02-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1978815743

Download The Struggle of Non-Sovereign Caribbean Territories Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

The Struggle of Non-Sovereign Caribbean Territories is an essay collection made up of two sections; in the first, a group of anglophone and francophone scholars examines the roots, effects and implications of the major social upheaval that shook Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, and Réunion in February and March of 2009. They clearly demonstrate the critical role played by community activism, art and media to combat politico-economic policies that generate (un)employment, labor exploitation, and unattended health risks, all made secondary to the supremacy of profit. In the second section, additional scholars provide in-depth analyses of the ways in which an insistence on capital accumulation and centralization instantiated broad hierarchies of market-driven profit, capital accumulation, and economic exploitation upon a range of populations and territories in the wider non-sovereign and nominally sovereign Caribbean from Haiti to the Dutch Antilles to Puerto Rico, reinforcing the racialized patterns of socioeconomic exclusion and privatization long imposed by France on its former colonial territories.

Midnight Robber

Midnight Robber
Author: Nalo Hopkinson
Publisher: Aspect
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2001-03-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0759521123

Download Midnight Robber Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

"Deeply satisfying...succeeds on a grand scale...best of all is the language....Hopkinson's narrative voice has a way of getting under the skin."--The New York Times Book Review "Caribbean patois adorns this novel with graceful rhythms...Beneath it lie complex, clearly evoked characters, haunting descriptions of exotic planets, and a stirring story...[This book] ought to elevate Hopkinson to star status." --Seattle Times It's Carnival time and the Caribbean-colonized planet of Toussaint is celebrating with music, dance, and pageantry. Masked "Midnight Robbers" waylay revelers with brandished weapons and spellbinding words. To young Tan-Tan, the Robber Queen is simply a favorite costume to wear at the festival--until her power-corrupted father commits an unforgiveable crime. Suddenly, both father and daughter are thrust into the brutal world of New Half-Way Tree. Here monstrous creatures from folklore are real, and the humans are violent outcasts in the wilds. Tan-Tan must reach into the heart of myth and become the Robber Queen herself. For only the Robber Queen's legendary powers can save her life . . . and set her free.

Recharting the Caribbean

Recharting the Caribbean
Author: William M. Maurer
Publisher:
Total Pages: 660
Release: 1994
Genre:
ISBN:

Download Recharting the Caribbean Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Contradictory Indianness

Contradictory Indianness
Author: Atreyee Phukan
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2022-07-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1978829124

Download Contradictory Indianness Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

As Contradictory Indianness shows, a postcolonial Caribbean aesthetics that has from its inception privileged inclusivity, interraciality, and resistance against Old World colonial orders requires taking into account Indo-Caribbean writers and their reimagining of Indianness in the region. Whereas, for instance, forms of Indo-Caribbean cultural expression in music, cuisine, or religion are more readily accepted as creolizing (thus, Caribbeanizing) processes, an Indo-Caribbean literary imaginary has rarely been studied as such. Discussing the work of Ismith Khan, Harold Sonny Ladoo, Totaram Sanadhya, LalBihari Sharma, and Shani Mootoo, Contradictory Indianness maintains that the writers' engagement with the regional and transnational poetics of the Caribbean underscores symbolic bridges between cultural worlds conventionally set apart—the Africanized and Indianized—and distinguishes between cultural worlds assumed to be the same—indenture and South Asian Indianness. This book privileges Indo-Caribbean fiction as a creolizing literary imaginary to broaden its study beyond a narrow canon that has, inadvertently or not, enabled monolithic and unidimensional perceptions of Indian cultural identity and evolution in the Caribbean, and continued to impose a fragmentary and disconnected study of (post)indenture aesthetics within indenture’s own transnational cartography.

Cyborg

Cyborg
Author: Matthew K. Manning
Publisher: Stone Arch Books
Total Pages: 49
Release: 2020-08
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1515878198

Download Cyborg Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

How did Cyborg become a member of the Justice League? Discover the story behind Victor Stone's journey from technological experiment to one of the World's Greatest Super Heroes, including the source of his high-tech computing powers. With action-packed illustrations and easy-to-follow text, these early reader books are perfect for young super hero fans.