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Author Shaw Nevins, Andrea, 1965- author.

Title Working juju : representations of the Caribbean fantastic / Andrea Shaw Nevins
Published Athens, Georgia : The University of Georgia Press, 2019
©2019

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Description 1 online resource
Contents Introduction. Kingdoms in other worlds : the science of working juju -- British obeah : the making of Caribbean savages -- Devilish divas and gangster monsters : Hollywood's monstrous imaginings of the Caribbean -- The haunting of a nation : death and discourse in Jamaica -- Exodus : the intergalactic movement of Jah people in the works of Tobias Buckell -- Conclusion. Seeing strange things : fantastical visual portrayals of the Caribbean -- Appendix. Interview with Tobias Buckell
Summary Working Juju examines how fantastical and unreal modes are deployed in portrayals of the Caribbean in popular and literary culture as well as in the visual arts. The Caribbean has historically been constructed as a region mantled by the fantastic. Andrea Shaw Nevins analyzes such imaginings of the Caribbean and interrogates the freighting of Caribbean-infused spaces with characteristics that register as fantastical. These fantastical traits may be described as magical, supernatural, uncanny, paranormal, mystical, and speculative. The book asks throughout, What are the discursive threads that run through texts featuring the Caribbean fantastic? In Working Juju, Nevins teases out the multilayered and often obscured connections among texts such as the Pirates of the Caribbean film series, planter and historian Edward Long's History of Jamaica, and Grenadian sci-fi writer Tobias Buckell's Xenowealth series set in the future Caribbean. Fantastical representations of the region generally occupy one of two spaces. In the first, the Caribbean fantastic facilitates an imagining of the colonial experience and its aftermath as one in which the region and its representatives exercise agency and in which the humanity of the region's inhabitants is asserted. Alternately, the fantastic is sometimes situated as a signifier of the irrational and uncivilized. The thread that unites portrayals of the fantastic Caribbean in the latter kind of works is that they tend to locate Caribbean belief systems as powerful, even at times inadvertently in contradiction to the text's ideological posture. Nevins shows how the singular "Caribbean" identity that emerges in these text is at odds with the complex historical narratives of actual Caribbean countries and colonies
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on November 26, 2019)
Subject Caribbean literature (English) -- History and criticism
Fantastic, The, in literature.
Fantastic, The, in art.
Magic in literature.
Religion and literature -- Caribbean Area -- History
Literature and society -- Caribbean Area -- History
Literature and history -- Caribbean Area -- History
fantastic art.
SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Black Studies (Global)
Caribbean literature (English)
Civilization
Fantastic, The, in art
Fantastic, The, in literature
Intellectual life
Literature and history
Literature and society
Magic in literature
Manners and customs
Religion and literature
SUBJECT Caribbean Area -- Civilization. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85020280
Caribbean Area -- Social life and customs. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85020293
Caribbean Area -- Intellectual life
Subject Caribbean Area
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
History
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780820356105
0820356107