Narrative Mutations: Discourses of Heredity and Caribbean Literature

by Alcocer; Rudyard J.

• ISBN13: 9780415971157
• ISBN10: 0415971152
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-12-21
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Given the welcomed shift throughout the academy away from essentialist and biologically fixed understandings of "race" and the body, it is a curiosity worth exploring that so many sophisticated-and even radical-narratives retain physical and behavioral heredity as a guiding trope. The persistence of this concept in Caribbean literature informs not only discourses on race, ethnicity, and sexuality, but also conceptions of personal and regional identity in a postcolonial societies once dominated by slavery and the plantation. In this book, Rudyard Alcocer offers a theory of Caribbean narrative, accounting for the complex interactions between scientific and literary discourses while expanding the horizons of narrative studies in general. Covering works from Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea through contemporary fiction from the Hispanic Caribbean, Narrative Mutations analyzes the processes and concepts associated with heredity in exploring what it means to be "Caribbean."

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(18)
Chapter One Heredity and Discursivity: From Pre-History to the Plantation	19	(28)
Chapter Two Misce-gene-nation: Heredity and the Rise of Pluralism in Caribbean Narrative	47	(34)
Chapter Three Talking Flowers and Flowering People: Narrative, Plant Genetics, and Caribbean Identity	81	(32)
Chapter Four Bound Bodies: The Struggle in Caribbean Narrative Against Biological Determinism	113	(38)
Chapter Five Hybridity and Its Mysteries: Heredity, Intertextuality, and Cultural Identity in the Caribbean	151	(36)
Afterword Heredity, Narrative, and the Caribbean Diaspora	187	(4)
Notes	191	(24)
Bibliography	215	(10)
Index	225