Reading Erna Brodber Uniting the Black Diaspora through Folk Culture and Religion

Subjects:

• Literature » Literature (General)
• Multicultural Studies » Caribbean Studies
• Multicultural Studies » Black Studies
• Multicultural Studies » African Studies

Reviews:

• Jamaican novelist, anthropologist, historian, and sociologist Erna Brodber became a prominent West Indian writer during the second half of the 20th century. Her Afro-centric works emphasize the importance of ancestral spirituality and aesthetics, connecting to a vital cultural past. This first full-length study of Brodber includes several chapters of pertinent background material, then detailed analyses of three of Brodner's novels: Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, Myal, and Louisiana. Discussing such elements as allegory, irony, feminism, and syncretism, Roberts places Brodber within the context of the wider Caribbean and the Americas through comparisons with other writers, notably Zora Neale Hurston, Marcus Garvey, and W. E. B. Du Bois....Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.
  —Choice October 2006
• A Jamaica-born, US-based scholar of English, African-American, and Caribbean literature, Roberts examines representations of colonial and afrocentric spiritual relationships and practices in Brodber's fiction. She is particularly interested in her use of afro-diasporic religious beliefs and practices in the Caribbean, and her examination of how these values oppose colonial presumptions and social norms. She also wants to establish Brodber's importance as a member of the first generation of college educated diaspora descendants and radical intellectual workers during the 1960s.
  —Reference & Research Book News August 2006

Table of Contents:

• Preface
• Origins of a Tradition: The Continuum of Caribbean Literature
• The Informing Intellectual Climate
• Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Social Constructions
• Bodber's Discursive Position Within and Without Caribbean Literary Traditions and Tropes
• Women Writers and Feminism: A Canon of Their Own Tropes and Concerns
• Reading the Text: The Sometimes Ambiguous Kumbla of the folk in Jane and Louisa
• Getting Out of the Physical Kumbla and Getting Back to the Spiritual Kumbla: Historisizing Textual Temporality
• Reading Myal and Thwarting Spirit Thievery
• The Location of Spirit Thievery
• Redemption Allegories and Myalism
• Tropes of the Harlem Renaissance-Minstrelsy and Early 20th Century Black Representation
• African Spirituality: The Ultimate Connection
• Intimations of Allegories of Unification
• Epilogue
• Notes