Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
33
result(s) for
"Edmondson, Belinda"
Sort by:
Caribbean Middlebrow
It is commonly assumed that Caribbean culture is split into elite highbrow culture-which is considered derivative of Europe and not rooted in the Caribbean-and authentic working-class culture, which is often identified with such iconic island activities as salsa, carnival, calypso, and reggae. InCaribbean Middlebrow, Belinda Edmondson recovers a middle ground, a genuine popular culture in the English-speaking Caribbean that stretches back into the nineteenth century.
Edmondson shows that popular novels, beauty pageants, and music festivals are examples of Caribbean culture that are mostly created, maintained, and consumed by the Anglophone middle class. Much of middle-class culture, she finds, is further gendered as \"female\": women are more apt to be considered recreational readers of fiction, for example, and women's behavior outside the home is often taken as a measure of their community's respectability.
Edmondson also highlights the influence of American popular culture, especially African American popular culture, as early as the nineteenth century. This is counter to the notion that the islands were exclusively under the sway of British tastes and trends. She finds the origins of today's \"dub\" or spoken-word Jamaican poetry in earlier traditions of genteel dialect poetry-as exemplified by the work of the Jamaican folklorist, actress, and poet Louise \"Miss Lou\" Bennett Coverley-and considers the impact of early Caribbean novels, includingEmmanuel Appadocca(1853) andJane's Career(1913).
eBook
The Black Romance
Further, over a decade ago African American feminist scholars Claudia Tate and Ann duCille broke new ground when they attempted to rehabilitate the African American romance by arguing for its political relevance and relationship to the supposedly more \"authentic\" fiction that critics focused on as the progenitors of modern African American literature. Building on both these arguments, I am making the claim that, even in its earliest conception, the romance in both African American and Afro-Caribbean writing has never been completely separate from that of other, more explicitly nationalist, genres such as the protest novel.1 Further, I posit that the black-on-black erotica that now defines the African diaspora romance had its earlier progenitors in a combination of earlier romance plots: in the \"coupling convention,\" as duCille puts it, of early African American narrative in which the black hero and heroine couple marry for the good of the community; as well as in the more problematic issue of the black-white interracial romance.
Journal Article
Public Spectacles: Caribbean Women and the Politics of Public Performance
Given the historical stereotypes of black women perpetuated under slavery, it is not surprising, then, that members of the relatively small emergent black middle class, barely a generation out of slavery at the end of the nineteenth century, should feel the need to distance middle class black women from these images in order to make social and political progress. Since respectable middle class black women could not create physical differences between themselves and working class women-to the nonblack observer, though, black was simply black-it became imperative to create notable and distinct differences in habit, speech, and style. The most vociferous supporters of the brown-identified beauty contests are the heavily black audience members. [...]as has been noted more than once, Jamaica's famed dancehall queen is a brown woman, whose decade-long reign is unheard-of in a contest where the queens do not usually last longer than a few months and whose tenure is usually determined by the approval of the black working class? [...]the government was publicly aligned with American political and business interests on the island. [...]Creole refers to those who are descended from or who participate in the mixed cultural heritage of the society. 13.
Journal Article
The Urban-Rural Dialectic and the Changing Role of Black Women
Although novels and other literary expressions were being produced in the English-speaking Caribbean from the late eighteenth century, the early decades of the twentieth century are the period associated with the beginnings of Caribbean literature. This is so because of the confluence of factors: the unprecedented number of newspapers and magazines being published during this period; the rise of a generation of literate black and non-white readers who were the fruits of the mandate for a free basic education in the English colonies; the increasingly urban nature of the societies as rural labourers moved to the cities and their populations swelled; and the surging nationalism of Caribbean countries, which began to seriously consider some form of autonomy from Great Britain. The combustion of these elements produced the literary ferment that led to the ground-breaking novels, or 'textual turning points', that define the themes of Caribbean literature into the present.
Book Chapter
Brownness, Social Desire, and the Early Novel
In Trinidad, in the years 1853 and 1854, long before the famed Trinidad Awakening of the 1930s, two novels about brown people, both by brown authors, found their way into circulation. Emmanuel Appadocca, by the well-known Trinidadian lawyer, editor, and orator Michel Maxwell Philip, was a gothic adventure of Caribbean pirates on the high seas. Published in London in 1854, the novel went on to become a Trinidadian best seller of sorts: the royalties were enough to support Philip’s expensive legal studies.¹ The other, Adolphus, was a romance penned by an anonymous author and serialized in 1853 in the “radical”
Book Chapter