“Marked by Genetics and Exile”

McCullough, Kate

doi:10.1215/10642684-6-4-577

Cited by 9 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Although it is a place of refuge, the garden is neither a hiding place (128) nor a specimen collection created to serve the scientific and horticultural needs of empire. Nor is it a stereotypical timeless, “lush,”“fecund” landscape (McCullough 2000, 597). Mala's horticultural approach defies the ordered and bordered gardens grown by the white SNW colonizers for either scientific or aesthetic purposes.…”

Section: A Garden In Paradisementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Mootoo lightens the weight of Mala's having to assert and defend her right to speak and be heard, a process that could turn witnessing into another form of violation (Oliver 2001, 100). Mootoo connects the violence hidden within ideologies of the loving, happy family with the violence of heteronormative, racist, “humanizing” colonial institutions (including the Christian mission, colonial education, and slave and indentured labor) created to serve the needs and ideals of the “productive” family of capitalist empire (Davis 2002, 147; McCullough 2000, 578). Mootoo tells secrets usually kept silent in order to “keep the‘family’ together” (Ford and Crabtree 2002, 82).…”

Section: Strategic Unintelligibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Trauma in Paradise: Willful and Strategic Ignorance inCereus Blooms at Night

May¹

2006

Hypatia

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Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night demonstrates how willful and strategic epistemologies of ignorance intertwine. By rejecting a compartmentalized approach to domination, Mootoo highlights the disjuncture between idealized images offamily, home, love, and the Caribbean and traumatic events of personal and cultural history. Mootoo not only asks readers to take up resistant questioning, argues May, but also to recognize that epistemology must acknowledge unspeakable and silenced stories to adequately account for multiple ways of knowing.To face the suffering of the Other, and to be prepared to heed the interpellations of the Other, requires that we liberate philosophy from its hubris by acknowledging its failures. -Linda Martin Alcoff and Eduardo MendietaCereus Blooms at Night, Shani Mootoo's 1996 novel, is set in the town of Paradise on the imaginary Caribbean island Lantanacamara. Colonized by the "Shivering Northern Wetlands" (SNW), its landscape is dotted with towns, sugar plantations, and missionary churches and schools created and named by Wetlanders. In setting the novel on a fictional, nonspecific Caribbean island, rather than on Trinidad where she grew up, Mootoo follows in the footsteps of other Caribbean women writers who have found a critical utility in crafting an imaginary space from which to remember identities and histories differently.' Rather than have the Caribbean be read as an already known space, a space imagined, named, and understood from a Wetlandish standpoint, Mootoo Hypatia VOI. 21. no. 3 (Summer 2006) 0 by Vivian M. May

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Section: A Garden In Paradisementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Strategic Unintelligibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Trauma in Paradise: Willful and Strategic Ignorance inCereus Blooms at Night

May¹

2006

Hypatia

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Migratory Sexualities, Diasporic Histories, and Memory in Queer Cuban-American Cultural Production

Sugg

2003

Environ Plan D

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Interrogations of diasporic relations between place, subjectivity, and sexuality have transformed representational practices and paradigms of both Cuban and Cuban-American identity on multiple fronts. Through a consideration of two texts representing the Cuban diaspora-Achy Obejas's 1996 novel Memory Mambo and Carmelita Tropicana's performance piece “Milk of amnesia/Leche de amnesia”, first developed in 1994–I explore the centrality of sexuality in constructions of self, community, and nation. These works effectively ‘queer’ notions of immigrant belonging and Cuban diasporic consciousness, particularly in the sense of exploring the spatial imaginary of diaspora to expose and question the heteropatriarchal, and hence nationalist, underpinnings of more dominant models of diaspora. In their work, Obejas and Tropicana indicate the spatial dimensions of cultural memory and the imbrication of diasporic politics and sexualities. Attending to differences in genre, each work mines a crucial interplay between diasporic and sexual histories. In Tropicana's performance piece she uses a parodic sensibility and the broad humor enabled by the stage to engage, in a new register, with the politics of memory and the uses of place and sexuality, both in relation to Cuba and to the United States. Obejas works through and against the conventions of the contemporary novel (both immigrant and lesbian coming-of-age stories, in particular) to undo many of the assumptions regarding memory, sexuality, and cultural nostalgia as they are represented in her narrative. Both Obejas and Tropicana assert an imbrication of histories of colonialism, migration, and national attachment with experiences and practices of sexuality and gender in ways that underscore the importance of space and place in the constitution of collective memories.

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Mapping the Lived–Imagined Caribbean: Postcolonial Geographies in the Literature of the ‘Diasporic’ Caribbean

Preziuso¹

2010

Journal of Intercultural Studies

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“Marked by Genetics and Exile”

Cited by 9 publications

References 16 publications

Trauma in Paradise: Willful and Strategic Ignorance inCereus Blooms at Night

Trauma in Paradise: Willful and Strategic Ignorance inCereus Blooms at Night

Migratory Sexualities, Diasporic Histories, and Memory in Queer Cuban-American Cultural Production

Mapping the Lived–Imagined Caribbean: Postcolonial Geographies in the Literature of the ‘Diasporic’ Caribbean

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