Symbolism 16

Rüdiger Ahrens, Florian Kläger, Klaus Stierstorfer, Keith A. Sandiford, Rüdiger Ahrens, Florian Kläger, Klaus Stierstorfer

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9783110465907
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Essays in this special focus constellate around the diverse symbolic forms in which Caribbean consciousness has manifested itself transhistorically, shaping identities within and without structures of colonialism and postcolonialism. Offering interdisciplinary critical, analytical and theoretical approaches to the objects of study, the book explores textual, visual, material and ritual meanings encoded in Caribbean lived and aesthetic practices.

Fußnoten

1	Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1972): 54; Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1987): 117.
2	Wilson Harris, Palace of the Peacock (London: Faber and Faber, 1988): 24.
3	Salma Bannouri, Consumption of Bias and Rep[e]tition as a Revisionary Strategies [sic] in Palace of the Peacock and in the Thought of Wilson Harris (MA Thesis, University of Montréal, Département d’Études Anglaises, 2015): 20; <https://papyrus.bib.umontreal.ca/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1866/12555/Bannouri_Salma_2015_memoire.pdf> (acc. March 9, 2016).
4	Rory Ryan, “Towards a Geography of the Symbolic,” Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies 12.2 (2003): 211–221, 213; see also Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973): 49.
5	Cynthia Fuchs Epstein finds consistent articulation for these functions in the work of both Foucault and Bourdieu. Her discussion also includes the implication of symbols with coercive violence; see Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, “Tinkerbells and Pinups,” in Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality, eds. Michele Lamont and Marcel Fournier (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992): 232–256, 238.
6	Fuchs Epstein extends these relations in “Tinkerbells and Pinups,” 238.
7	Derek Walcott, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory,” Nobel Lecture (December 7, 1992) <http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1992/walcott-lecture.html> (acc. March 9, 2016).
8	Daniel J. Crowley, “Plural and Differential Acculturation in Trinidad,” American Anthropologist 59 (1957): 817–824, 823.
9	For a related discussion of the relationships of hybridity to symbolic representations of race and ethnicity in the politics of nationalism and cultural performance in the Caribbean, see Shalini Puri, The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post/Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 46–111.
10	For Walcott’s ideas on the sources of mythopoeia, see Walcott, “The Antilles,” and Gregson Davis, “Reflections on Omeros” in The Poetics of Derek Walcott: Intertextual Perspectives, ed. Gregson Davis, issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly 96 (1997): 232–236. Critics of Harris’ writings perceive his mythopoeic quest in the aesthetics of his precolonial, colonial and postcolonial symbol-making; see Wilson Harris, The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination (Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1983): 24, and Hena Maes Jelinek, “Wilson Harris: A Life of Writing. Dream, Psyche, Genesis: The Works of Wilson Harris,” <http://www.l3.ulg.ac.be/harris/whintro.html> (acc. April 4, 2016).
11	Paula Burnett, Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics (Gainesville, FL: UP of Florida, 2000): 92.
12	Antonio Benitez-Rojo, The Repeating Island (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1996): 236–237.
13	Earl Lovelace, “Requiring of the World,” in Growing in the Dark, ed. Funso Aiyejina (San Juan, Trinidad: Lexicon, 2003): 229–232, 230.
14	The term sankofa itself is a word in the Twi language which means “go back and get it.” Adinkra is a system of symbols used among the Akan people of Ghana to represent proverbs, philosophical concepts, mores; see Dee Galloway, “African Tradition, Proverbs, and Sankofa,” <http://www.spiritualsproject.org/sweetchariot/Literature/sankofa.php> (acc. March 9, 2016).
15	Norbert Elias, The Symbol Theory (London: Sage, 1991): 119.
16	Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville, VA: U of Virginia P, 1989): 67.
17	Elias, Symbol Theory, 109.
18	Mark E. Denaci, “Challenging Orthodoxies: Cuban-American Art and Postmodernist Criticism,” in Cuban-American Literature and Art: Negotiating Identities, eds. Isabel Álvarez Bor...