The Caribbean Postcolonial

Exploring the relationship between discourses of cultural hybridity and projects for social equality, The Caribbean Postcolonial reveals a far greater diversity of political and aesthetic practices of cultural hybridity than has been generally recognized in postcolonial and cultural studies. It uncovers the logics according to which some forms of hybridity are enshrined and others disavowed in the Caribbean imagination and in the disciplinary imagination of postcolonial studies. Exploring cultural formations ranging from mestizaje and creolization to mulatto and dougla aesthetics, from literature to music, theater, Hosay, and carnival, it examines the sources of the appeal of cultural hybridity for both nationalist and postnationalist agendas. The first book-length study to offer an explicitly comparative account of cultural hybridity in the postcolonial arena, The Caribbean Postcolonial is a forceful argument for historicizing theory. It intervenes in key debates around popular agency and cultural resistance, feminism and cultural nationalism, the relations between postmodernism and postcolonialism, and the status of nationalism in an era of globalization.

Shalini Puri is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, where she works on Caribbean and postcolonial literary and cultural studies. She is contributing editor of the interdisciplinary anthology Marginal Migrations: The Circulation of Cultures Within the Caribbean (2003).