Caribbean Perspectives on Modernity:
Returning Medusa's Gaze |
| |
| Maria Cristina Fumagalli |
| 224 pages, 6 x 9 |
| 13 b&w illustrations |
| Cloth ISBN 978-0-8139-2857-9 • $59.50 |
| Paper ISBN 978-0-8139-2858-6 • $22.50 |
| New World
Studies |
| November 2009 |
 |
Taking up the challenge of redefining modernity from a Caribbean
perspective instead of assuming that the North Atlantic view of
modernity is universal, Maria Cristina Fumagalli shows how the
Caribbean's contributions to the modern world not only provide
a more accurate account of the past but also have the potential
to change the way in which we imagine the future.Fumagalli uses
the myth of Medusa's gaze turning people into stone to describe
the way North Atlantic modernity freezes its "others" into a state
of perpetual backwardness that produces an ethnocentric narrative
based on homogenization, vilification, and disempowerment that
actively ignores what fails to conform to the story it wants to
tell about itself. In analyzing narratives of modernity that originate
in the Caribbean, the author explores the region's refusal to
succumb to Medusa's spell and highlights its strategies to outstare
the Gorgon.
Reflecting a diversity of texts, genres, and media, the chapters
focus on sixteenth-century engravings and paintings from the Netherlands
and Italy, a scientific romance produced at the turn of the twentieth
century by the king of the Caribbean island Redonda, contemporary
collections of poetry from the anglophone Caribbean, a historical
novel by the Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé, a Latin epic,
a Homeric hymn, ancient Egyptian rites, fairy tales, romances
from England and Jamaica, a long narrative poem by the Nobel Prize
winner Derek Walcott, and paintings by artists from Europe and
the Americas spanning the seventeenth century to the present.Caribbean
Perspectives on Modernity offers an original and creative
contribution to what it means to be modern.
Maria Cristina Fumagalli is Senior
Lecturer in the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies
at the University of Essex in England.
