Digital Commons Network^™

‘Is Not Story, Is The Gospel Truth’: Fact And Fiction In Ian Strachan’S God’S Angry Babies, Joyce Johnson

Kunapipi

In God’s Angry Babies, Ian Strachan interweaves different types and styles of discourse as he examines the extent to which stories circulating at a popular level within a community colour people’s vision of reality and influence behaviour. Stories, as used in this discussion, include narratives describing events, and fictional stories as well as ‘ideologies, rationalizations and explanations’ (Faust 2). Type of discourse refers to the distinctions which are made, for example, between myth, legend, folktale, autobiographical writing, news report and letter. Differences in style are created by the mixture of language varieties, the use of figurative language, shifts between direct …

Development And Same-Sex Desire In Caribbean Allegorical Autobiography: Shani Mootoo’S Cereus Blooms At Night, And Jamaica Kincaid’S Annie John And Lucy, Roberto Strongman

Kunapipi

The representation of gay and lesbian sexualities in the Caribbean began receiving much attention in US popular culture when, on May 24, 1998, a New York Times article cited The Cayman Islands’ Minister of Tourism as having said he had denied docking rights to a Norwegian Cruise Line ship that was chartered as a gay cruise because ‘a ship chartered by gay tourists came to the Cayman Islands in 1987, and the visitors’ public displays of affection offended many residents’ (McDowell 3).

Savage Skins: The Freakish Subject Of Tattooed Beachcombers, Annie Werner

Kunapipi

When the first beachcombers started to return to Europe from the Pacific, their indigenously tattooed bodies were the subject of both fascination and horror. While some exhibited themselves in circuses, sideshows, museums and fairs, others published narratives of their experiences, and these narratives cumulatively came to constitute the genre of beachcomber narratives, which had been emerging steadily since the early 1800s. As William Cummings points out, the process of tattooing or being tattooed was often a ‘central trope’ (7) in the beachcomber narratives.

Kunapipi 27 (1) 2005 Full Version, Anne Collett

Kunapipi

Kunapipi 27 (1) 2005 Full Version

Notes On Contributors, Anne Collett

Kunapipi

Notes on Contributors

Interview With Albert Wendt, Christe Michel

Kunapipi

Albert Tuaopepe Wendt is the most acclaimed novelist, poet and short story writer from Samoa1 and the South Pacific literary region. Born in 1939 in Western Samoa, he is a member of the aiga (extended family) Sa-Tuaopepe, branch of the Sa-Tuala and he was brought up in Apia where he completed his primary school education. In 1952, he was granted a scholarship from the New Zealand administration and moved to the New Plymouth Boys’ High School in New Zealand from where he graduated in 1957.

Dymphna Cusack As A Precursor Of Commonwealth Literature, Ken Goodwin

Kunapipi

Although imperial and colonial discourse has existed in English since at least the sixteenth century, reaching extensive proportions in the United States both before and after Independence and in India during the nineteenth century,2 the forms of twentieth-century debate, often called postcolonialism (or, less plausibly, postcolonial theory) have altered in the direction of trying to displace the imperial power, perfidious Albion, from the centre of the discussion and to treat it contumeliously while concentrating on supposed similarities of culture among the colonies and former colonies. An early text for the first of these twentiethcentury trends might be found in the …

No Beginning, No End: The Legacy Of Absence In Jamaica Kincaid’S The Autobiography Of My Mother, Alan Shima

Kunapipi

A sea is large. If placed in the middle of it, you will feel the pull and tug of waves, each mounting swell adding volume to what is before and beneath you. Jamaica Kincaid’s writing can be a sea. Her narratives unfurl in the heave and thrust of thought curling back upon itself. Incidental descriptions may have the simple surface of account; but think twice because the emotional undertow of her work will take you elsewhere.

‘It Was Like Singing In The Wilderness’: An Interview With Unity Dow, M.J Daymond, Margaret Lenta

Kunapipi

Unity Dow has published three novels in rapid succession: Far and Beyon’ (2000), The Screaming of the Innocent (2002) and Juggling Truths (2003). She is also the first woman to be appointed a judge of the High Court in Botswana; before her appointment she was an attorney and a prominent human rights activist, and she won some landmark cases in Botswana.

Literary Modernism In Asia: Pramoedya And Kolatkar, Rajeev S Patke

Kunapipi

Modernism is a large, loose, and baggy monster of a term, which struggles to encompass a diverse set of creative practices and cultural assumptions with European origins and a field of reference that has since become unevenly global. I propose to use the example of two writers from outside Europe in order to argue that the tension between artistic modernism and societal modernisation characteristic of European culture in the early part of the twentieth century is reproduced — or, more precisely, transfigured — in postcolonial contexts during the latter half of the twentieth century in differential ways that go beyond …

Postcolonialism In An Anti-Colonial State: Unity Dow And Modern Botswana, Margaret Lenta

Kunapipi

Until Unity Dow began to write, almost no Batswana writers of fiction had produced books which reached the world outside, and the reasons for this were partly cultural and partly material. Botswana has more than a century’s history of defensive resistance to influences from the other states of southern Africa.

Interrogating Indian Nationalism In The Postcolonial Context, R Azhagarasan

Kunapipi

Nationalism in India, as we see from the wheel in the centre of the flag, and as we know from the story of Gandhi, has been constructed partly on the economics and symbolism of textiles. Emma Tarlo has catalogued the development of ‘national dress’, and state governments in India enshrine certain kinds of textile production as national culture by propping up handloom co-operatives. This text of identity and cloth has become so accepted that Dipesh Chakrabarty now reports we can tell a politician on the make by his hypocritically rigorous adherence to khaddar wear. Such a national text/ile overlooks a …

Kunapipi 26 (2) 2004 Full Version, Anne Collett

Kunapipi

Kunapipi 26 (2) 2004 Full Version

Notes On Contributors, Anne Collett

Kunapipi

Notes on Contributors

Race And Gender At The Chicago Columbian Exposition, 1893: A Cuban Woman’S Perspective, Luz Mercedes Hincapie

Kunapipi

During the nineteenth century international exhibitions and world fairs constituted an important apparatus of empire for European countries and the United States. Through the exhibitions these countries educated their masses on the merits of empire and industry while also trying to out-do each other by showing greater wealth and political power. One way of doing this was through the many displays of non-Western peoples usually under their imperial dominion.

The Dream Of An Order: Race And Gender And The Project Of An-Other Caribbean History, Marta Jimena Cabrera

Kunapipi

The historical novel Yngermina or the Daughter of Calamar (1844) is Colombia’s first novel and one that illustrates the difficulties in conceptualising and representing women, natives and blacks in the nineteenth-century nation-making process. In Latin America, this period of national formation is linked to the idealism of the liberal elites, where the masses are romanticised and symbolically integrated into a homogenous ‘imagined community’.

Reappraising ‘Valuejudgements On Art And The Question Of Macho Attitudes: The Case Of Derek Walcott’ By Elaine Savory Fido, Rhonda Hammond

Kunapipi

It is as if woman has little reality in Walcott’s imagination, and that there is little between romanticism on the one hand and appalled rejection on the other in her treatment in his works.

(Savory Fido 1986)

Writing The Silence: Fiction And Poetry Of Marlene Nourbese Philip, Dorothy Jones

Kunapipi

Like many writers, Marlene Nourbese Philip is preoccupied with the limitations of language: how to make words convey the inexpressible, that which is beyond language. In her book Looking For Livingstone she writes of silence:

Settling Into ‘Unhomeliness’: Displacement In Selected Caribbean And Caribbean Canadian Women’S Writing, Evelyn Ocallaghan

Kunapipi

Faced with horrific daily evidence of the consequences of polarisation on the ‘grounds’ of difference (racial, ethnic, religious), I find myself increasingly emphasising culture contact and transculturation in my teaching practice. This is a reasonable enough focus in the Caribbean context, and it certainly is appropriate to my history as a product of such processes: my parents were born in two different countries, I was born in a third, brought up in a fourth and live and work in yet another; my children were born in one country, of parents born in two other countries, and they too will very …

‘Of, And Not Of, This Place’: Attachment And Detachment In Caryl Phillips’ A Distant Shore, Benedicte Ledent

Kunapipi

Interviewed about his novels in 2003, Caryl Phillips declared ‘These all seem to be the same book, part of a continuum’ (Morrison). Obviously, his seventh work of fiction, A Distant Shore (2003), does not disrupt this sense of great cohesion, also acknowledged by his commentators. Although the contemporary setting of A Distant Shore is unusual for a novelist who has occasionally been labelled a chronicler of the African Diaspora, this new book constitutes another memorable stage in Phillips’ subtle, yet dogged fictional exploration of the tension between attachment and detachment, between belonging and unbelonging that has been part of human …

Jamaica’S First Dub Poets: Early Jamaican Deejaying As A Form Of Oral Poetry, Eric Doumerc

Kunapipi

Dub poetry is usually taken to refer to a particular type of ‘performance poetry’, a brand of oral poetry performed to the accompaniment of reggae music. The term ‘dub poetry’ itself is thought to have been invented by the Jamaican poet Oku Onuora to describe a form of oral art that had been developing in Jamaica since the early 1970s. Oku Onuora defined the term in an interview conducted with the poet and critic Mervyn Morris in 1979.

Cyclone Culture And The Paysage Pineaulien, Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw

Kunapipi

In the opening pages of Gisèle Pineau’s, L’Espérance–macadam, the female narrator’s language is broken, fragmented, as the body of the text itself reflects the passing of a cyclone or, as it is called in the novel, ‘Le passage de La Bête’. There is a direct link between the violence and violation of the woman’s body by the ‘Beast’, which in the novel is both man and cyclone — man as cyclone — and the Guadeloupean landscape. This dual force not only razes the landscape, destroying vegetation and homes, but is used metaphorically to describe analogous acts of violence by men …

Reflections On The French Caribbean Woman: The Femme Matador In Fact And Fiction, Bonnie Thomas

Kunapipi

A recurrent image of women to emerge in the history and literature of the French Caribbean is that of the femme matador, or the fighting woman who courageously resists life’s trials. This gendered figure is frequently placed in opposition to the Caribbean male who flits about as carefree as a butterfly

Demystifying ‘Reality’ In Sistren’S Bellywoman Bangarang, Karina Smith

Kunapipi

Sistren Theatre Collective’s debut production Bellywoman Bangarang (1978) is considered a landmark in Caribbean theatre. When first staged twenty-six years ago in Kingston’s Barn Theatre, the play caused a stir among theatre-goers for its unmasking of social taboos surrounding sexuality, teenage pregnancy, and domestic violence. Based on the life stories of Sistren members, Bellywoman Bangarang explores the inequalities Jamaican girls face as they mature from childhood to adulthood.

Jean Rhys’S Cardboard Doll’S Houses, Sue Thomas

Kunapipi

In Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) one of Jean Rhys’s mordant figures for Rochester’s need to assimilate white Creole Antoinette Cosway Mason Rochester into a gendered middle-class Englishness is the ‘marionette’ (90, 92) or ‘doll’ (90, 93, 102, 103), the inert object of his desire and hatred. The others are the ‘grey wrapper’ rather than the red dress in which she is clothed at Thornfield Hall, and zombification (Rhys’s West Indian interpretation of what Rochester sees as a doll-like condition). In Rhys’s published and unpublished fiction of the 1930s — Voyage in the Dark (1934), and the typescript ‘The Cardboard Dolls’ …

‘Let Them Know You Have Broughtuptcy’: Childhood And Child-Subjects In Olive Senior’S Short Stories, Helen Gilbert

Kunapipi

Critical appraisals of Olive Senior’s fiction seldom fail to highlight its preoccupation with childhood as a powerful trope through which to express the personal and social legacies of Jamaica’s colonial history. This is to be expected given that over two-thirds of the stories in her three published collections, Summer Lightning (1986), Arrival of the Snake-Woman (1989) and Discerner of Hearts (1995), focus on a child’s experience or perspective, or both, with a significant number of these being told, in whole or in part, by child narrators.

The ‘Brown Skin Gal’ In Fact And Fiction, Beverley Ormerod Noakes

Kunapipi

Around the figure of the ‘brown skin gal’ — the Caribbean woman of mixed race — float many associations, some flattering, some detrimental. Several of them are implicit in the innocent words of a popular song of the 1950s:

Brown skin gal, stay home and mind baby …

I’m going away in a sailing boat

And if I don’t come back

Stay home and mind baby.

Kunapipi 26 (1) 2004, Contents, Editorial, Anne Collett

Kunapipi

Kunapipi 26 (1) 2004, Contents, Editorial

Kunapipi 26(1) 2004 Full Version, Anne Collett

Kunapipi

Kunapipi 26(1) 2004 Full Version

Abstracts, Notes Of Contributors, Editorial Board, Anne Collett

Kunapipi

Abstracts, Notes of Contributors, Editorial Board