• "This book makes a very considerable intellectual
contribution, both to Caribbean studies in particular and to postcolonial
studies in general. Its scholarly merits are multiple, not the least
being its courageous and successful effort to deal with the Caribbean
as a multicultural whole. . . . De Ferrari navigates this intricate
diversity with insight and elegance, guiding her reader toward a
richer, more complex understanding of the Caribbean."
—Sylvia Molloy, Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities,
New York University
•"Vulnerable States shows how impossible it is to extricate
the Body from the cultural discourses that surround it, as well
as from the subjectivity that it helps to produce. De Ferrari seeks
to understand the dialectics between the writing of the self and
the intervention upon the Other; the ideologies of colonialism and
the resilience of those 'vulnerable' bodies that it aimed to rule.
In its analyses of French, Hispanic, and anglophone texts, it embodies
the Caribbean at its best: a region both surprisingly 'open' but
also joined by a unique sense of historical memory."
—Jose Quiroga, Emory University
|
Vulnerable States:
Bodies of Memory in Contemporary Caribbean Fiction |
| |
| Guillermina De Ferrari |
| 272 pages, 6 x 9 |
| Cloth 978-0-8139-2646-9 • $69.50 |
| Paper 978-0-8139-2647-6 • $24.50 |
| New World
Studies |
| November 2007 |
 |
According to Martinican theorist Édouard Glissant, the twentieth century has been dominated in the Caribbean by a passion for the remembrance of colonial history. But while Glissant identifies this passion for memory in the thematizing of nature in Caribbean modernist life, scholar Guillermina De Ferrari claims it is the vulnerability of the human body that has become the trope to which Caribbean postmodernist authors largely appeal in their efforts to revise the discourse that has shaped postcolonial societies. In Vulnerable States: Bodies of Memory in Contemporary Caribbean Fiction, De Ferrari offers a comparative study of novels from across the Caribbean, arguing that vulnerability (symbolic and therefore political) should be seen as the true foundation of Caribbeanness.
While most theories of the region have traditionally emphasized
corporeality as a constitutive aspect of Caribbean societies,
they assume its uniqueness is founded on race, itself understood
either as a "fact" of the body or as the "ethnic"
fusion of distinctive cultures of origin. In reconceptualizing
corporeality as vulnerability, De Ferrari proposes an alternative
view of Caribbeanness based on affect—that is, on an emotional
disposition that results from the alienating role historical,
medical, and anthropological notions of the body have traditionally
played in determining how the region understands itself. While
vulnerability thus addresses the role historically played by race
in determining systems of social and political powerlessness,
it also prefigures other ways in which Caribbeanness is currently
negotiated at local and international levels, ranging from the
stigmatization of the ill to the global fetishization of the region's
physical beauty, material degradation, and political stagnation.
Positioned at the intersection of literary and anthropological
study, Vulnerable States will appeal to Caribbeanists of
the three major language areas of the region as well as to postcolonial
scholars interested in issues of race, gender, and nation formation
Guillermina De Ferrari is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
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