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.
Table of Content
Foreword
Introduction: Crossing Disciplines, Cultures, Geographies
1. The Portuguese Jewish Nation: An Enlightenment Essay on the Colony of Suriname
2. Henrik Hertz and Racial Imagination in the Nineteenth-Century Danish Caribbean
3. Jamaican Jewish Tricksters: Philip Cohen Labatt’s Literary Crossings
4. Translating Cuba: Language, Race, and Homeland in Cuban-Yiddish Poetry of the 1930s
5. David Dabydeen’s Hogarth: Blacks, Jews, and Postcolonial Ekphrasis
6. Jubanidad and the Literary Transmission of Cuban Crypto-Judaism
7. Diaspora and Hybridity: Jewish American Women Write the Caribbean
8. Splattering the Object: Césaire, Nazi Racism, and the Colonial
9. From Shtetl to Settler and Back: André Schwarz-Bart’s Morning Star
10. Raphaël Confiant and Jewishness: The Fraught Landscapes of French, Martinican, and Franco-Martinican Intellectualisms
11. Caryl Phillips’s Post-Holocaust/Decolonized Interstices and the Levinasian Subjective in Higher Ground and The Nature of Blood
12. Ema
13. Meeting with Judith
14. Jewish-Cuban Poems
15. On The Nature of Blood and the Ghost of Anne Frank
Afterword: Little Family Quarrels
About the author
Sarah Phillips Casteel is Professor of English at Carleton University and the author of Second Arrivals: Landscape and Belonging in Contemporary Writing of the Americas(Virginia).
Heidi Kaufman is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oregon and the author of English Origins, Jewish Discourse, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel: Reflections on a Nested Nation.
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