Erna Brodber And Velma Pollard

Author : Violet Harrington Bryan
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 160 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2021-11-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781496836243

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Erna Brodber and Velma Pollard by Violet Harrington Bryan Pdf

Erna Brodber and Velma Pollard, two sister-writers born and raised in Jamaica, re-create imagined and lived homelands in their literature by commemorating the history, culture, and religion of the Caribbean. Velma Pollard was born in St. Catherine, Jamaica. By the time she was three, her parents had moved to Woodside, St. Mary, in northeast Jamaica, where her sister, Erna, was born. Even though they both travel widely and often, the sisters both still live in Jamaica. The sisters write about their homeland as a series of memories and stories in their many works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. They center on their home village of Woodside in St. Mary Parish, Jamaica, occasionally moving the settings of their fiction and poetry to other regions of Jamaica and various Caribbean islands, as well as other parts of the diaspora in the United States, Canada, and England. The role of women in the patriarchal society of Jamaica and much of the Caribbean is also a subject of the sisters’ writing. Growing up in what Brodber calls the kumbla, the protective but restrictive environment of many women in the Anglo-Caribbean, is an important theme in their fiction. In her fiction, Pollard discusses the gender gaps in employment and the demands of marriage and the special contributions of women to family and community. Many scholars have also explored the significance of spirit in Brodber’s work, including the topics of “spirit theft,” “spirit possession,” and spirits existing through time, from Africa to the present. Brodber’s narratives also show communication between the living and the dead, from Jane and Louisa (1980) to Nothing’s Mat (2014). Yet, few scholars have examined Brodber’s work on par with her sister’s writing. Drawing upon interviews with the authors, this is the first book to give Brodber and Pollard their due and study the sisters’ important contributions.

Author : Violet Harrington Bryan
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 99 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2021-11-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781496836229

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Erna Brodber and Velma Pollard by Violet Harrington Bryan Pdf

Erna Brodber and Velma Pollard, two sister-writers born and raised in Jamaica, re-create imagined and lived homelands in their literature by commemorating the history, culture, and religion of the Caribbean. Velma Pollard was born in St. Catherine, Jamaica. By the time she was three, her parents had moved to Woodside, St. Mary, in northeast Jamaica, where her sister, Erna, was born. Even though they both travel widely and often, the sisters both still live in Jamaica. The sisters write about their homeland as a series of memories and stories in their many works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. They center on their home village of Woodside in St. Mary Parish, Jamaica, occasionally moving the settings of their fiction and poetry to other regions of Jamaica and various Caribbean islands, as well as other parts of the diaspora in the United States, Canada, and England. The role of women in the patriarchal society of Jamaica and much of the Caribbean is also a subject of the sisters’ writing. Growing up in what Brodber calls the kumbla, the protective but restrictive environment of many women in the Anglo-Caribbean, is an important theme in their fiction. In her fiction, Pollard discusses the gender gaps in employment and the demands of marriage and the special contributions of women to family and community. Many scholars have also explored the significance of spirit in Brodber’s work, including the topics of “spirit theft,” “spirit possession,” and spirits existing through time, from Africa to the present. Brodber’s narratives also show communication between the living and the dead, from Jane and Louisa (1980) to Nothing’s Mat (2014). Yet, few scholars have examined Brodber’s work on par with her sister’s writing. Drawing upon interviews with the authors, this is the first book to give Brodber and Pollard their due and study the sisters’ important contributions.

Author : Erna Brodber
Publisher : Waveland Press
Page : 111 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2014-08-08
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781478626824

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Myal by Erna Brodber Pdf

Jamaican-born novelist and sociologist Erna Brodber describes Myal as “an exploration of the links between the way of life forged by the people of two points of the black diaspora—the Afro-Americans and the Afro-Jamaicans.” Operating on many literary levels—thematically, linguistically, stylistically—it is the story of women’s cultural and spiritual struggle in colonial Jamaica. The novel opens at the beginning of the 20th century with a community gathering to heal the mysterious illness of a young woman, Ella, who has returned to Jamaica after an unsuccessful marriage abroad. The Afro-Jamaican religion myal, which asserts that good has the power to conquer all, is invoked to heal Ella, who has been left "zombified” and devoid of any black soul. Ella, who is light skinned enough to pass for white, has suffered a breakdown after her white American husband produced a black-face minstrel show based on the stories of her village and childhood. This cultural appropriation is one of a series Ella encountered in her life, and parallels the ongoing theft of the labor and culture of colonized peoples for imperial gain and pleasure. The novel‘s rich, vivid language and vital characters earned it the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Canada and the Caribbean. The novel links nicely with Brodber’s coming-of-age story, Jane & Louisa Will Soon Come Home, also from Waveland Press, for its similar images, themes, and specific Jamaican cultural references to colonialism, religion, slavery, gender, and identity. Both novels are Brodber’s way of telling stories outside of published history to point out the whitewashing and distortion of black history through religion and colonialism.

Author : Mary Condé,Thorunn Lonsdale
Publisher : Springer
Page : 238 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 1999-02-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781349270712

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Caribbean Women Writers by Mary Condé,Thorunn Lonsdale Pdf

Caribbean Women Writers is a collection of scholarly articles on the fiction of selected Caribbean women writers from Antigua, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica and Trinidad. It includes not only close critical analysis of texts by Erna Brodber, Dionne Brand, Zee Edgell, Jamaica Kincaid, Paule Marshall, Pauline Melville, Jean Rhys and Olive Senior, but also personal statements from the writers Merle Collins, Beryl Gilroy, Vernella Fuller and Velma Pollard.

Author : Erna Brodber
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 147 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2014-07
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1478622849

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Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home by Erna Brodber Pdf

Author : Erna Brodber
Publisher : University of West Indies Press
Page : 106 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2014
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9766404941

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Nothing's Mat by Erna Brodber Pdf

Nothing?s Mat is told by a black British teenager ? ?every black girl? ? for she has no name until the very last chapters when she is teasingly called ?Princess? by her husband. Somewhere in the 1950s London-based Princess is allowed to complete her sixthform final exams by writing a long paper on the West Indian family instead of sitting an exam. She thinks this a godsend and that all she has to do is to interview her parents. Her father tries to help her with his side but they both find that their kin will not fit into the standard anthropological template. Her father thinks it a good time for her to go to Jamaica and meet her grandparents, who can better help her with her study.In Jamaica, much as her middle-class black Jamaican grandparents and her parents in England might not have liked it, Princess meets and spends time with her obscure cousin Nothing, called Conut. Conut introduces Princess to a plant that obeys certain divine principles and is available to humans to make artefacts for their comfort. Accordingly, they begin to make a mat and as they twist straw and bend it into intricate shapes, Conut tells her the family history so that their creation becomes for her a mat of anthropological template. The resulting shape presented to her teacher earns her an A and the comment that she has managed to project the West Indian family as a fractal rather than fractured as the published literature sees it.Her studies and subsequent academic career take her to London University and then back to Jamaica, but understimulated by the academy, she chooses to continue the family study from high school and to do so by crafting the information into the mat, which becomes for her a shield against spiritual and physical evil. Making the mat of ancestors takes her into myriad histories of young Englishmen in Jamaica, of Jamaican women in Panama, and of African Americans in Virginia, among others.This work is at once a fictional family history and a comment on anthropological methodology and African systems of thought.

Author : Erna Brodber
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 200 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2004
Category : History
ISBN : 9766401527

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Woodside, Pear Tree Grove P.O. by Erna Brodber Pdf

Clear Word and Third Sight examines the strands of a collective African diasporic consciousness represented in the work of a number of Black Caribbean writers. Catherine A. John shows how a shared consciousness, or third sight, is rooted in both pre- and postcolonial cultural practices and disseminated through a rich oral tradition. This consciousness has served diasporic communities by creating an alternate philosophical worldsense linking those of African descent across space and time. Contesting popular discourses about what constitutes culture and maintaining that neglected strains in negritude discourse provide a crucial philosophical perspective on the connections between folk practices, cultural memory, and collective consciousness, John examines the diasporic principles in the work of the negritude writers Leon Damas, Aime Cesaire, and Leopold Senghor. She traces the manifestations and reworkings of their ideas in Afro-Caribbean writing from the eastern and French Caribbean, as well as the Caribbean diaspora in the United States. The authors she discusses include Jamaica Kincaid, Earl Lovelace, Simone Schwarz-Bart, Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, and Edouard Glissant, amon

Author : Caryl Phillips
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 2017-09-13
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780525562818

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The Final Passage by Caryl Phillips Pdf

From the British-West Indian novelist who is rapidly emerging as the bard of the African diaspora comes a haunting work about “the final passage”—the exodus of black West Indians from their impoverished islands to the uncertain opportunities of England. In her village of St. Patrick’s, Leila Preston has no prospects, a young son, and a husband, Michael, who seems to prefer the company of his mistress. So when her ailing mother travels to England for medical care, Leila decides to follow her. As Caryl Phillips follows the Prestons’ outward voyage—and their bewildered attempt to find a home in a country whose rooming houses post signs announcing “No vacancies for coloureds”—he produces a tragicomic portrait of hope and dislocation. The Final Passage is a novel rich in language, acute in its grasp of character, and unforgettable in its vision of the colonial legacy. “Like Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez, Phillips writes of times so heady and chaotic and of characters so compelling that time moves as if guided by the moon and dreams.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review

Author : Paule Marshall
Publisher : National Geographic Books
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 1984-04-16
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780452267114

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Praisesong for the Widow by Paule Marshall Pdf

From the acclaimed author of Daughters and Brown Girl, Brownstones comes a “work of exceptional wisdom, maturity, and generosity, one in which the palpable humanity of its characters transcends any considerations of race or sex”(Washington Post Book World). Avey Johnson—a black, middle-aged, middle-class widow given to hats, gloves, and pearls—has long since put behind her the Harlem of her childhood. Then on a cruise to the Caribbean with two friends, inspired by a troubling dream, she senses her life beginning to unravel—and in a panic packs her bag in the middle of the night and abandons her friends at the next port of call. The unexpected and beautiful adventure that follows provides Avey with the links to the culture and history she has so long disavowed. “Astonishingly moving.”—Anne Tyler, The New York Times Book Review

Author : Violet Harrington Bryan
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 222 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 1993-01-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0870497898

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The Myth of New Orleans in Literature by Violet Harrington Bryan Pdf

"Many writers have appropriated the rich and varied rituals, attitudes, ceremonies, and language of New Orleans for various literary purposes. The culture can be read in the texts of George Washington Cable, Grace King, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Marcus Christian, Tennessee Williams, Tom Dent, and Brenda Marie Osbey. The idea of New Orleans as courtesan as well as the realization of the interdependence of the races in the city's music, art, architecture, religious worship, and community performance become legend in their works. Violet Bryan examines these literary appropriations and shows how writers from 1880 to the present have variously reflected a culture that registers complex patterns of race, gender, and class. Bryan examines the implicit and explicit connections between writers and their texts that compose the literary culture of New Orleans."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Author : Pamela Mordecai,Betty Wilson
Publisher : Heinemann
Page : 228 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 1989
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0435989065

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Her True-true Name by Pamela Mordecai,Betty Wilson Pdf

31 women writers from throughout the Caribbean express the loss and the longing, the pride and passion of the Caribbean identity.

Author : Velma Pollard
Publisher : Mango Publishing
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : Caribbean Area
ISBN : 190229436X

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Karl by Velma Pollard Pdf

Fiction. Afro-Caribbean Studies. "Pollard's brilliant language, her moving evocation of Jamaican places, events, and lives, [drives] her account of the quest of the archetypal bright Jamaican male for identity and manhood"--Daryl Cumber Dance. Karl is intelligent and reaps the rewards of his determined hard work through success. Yet, his social climbing leads to a place of rootlessnes and mental Ochaos' as Pollard's use of language flashes musically and incisively in turn tracing Karl's quest for identity and manhood in Jamaican society that is riddled with social issues. Karl's reprieve is poignantly narrated. Velma Pollard is a retired Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Education at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. Pollard is a widely published author, essayist and poet. Her poetry collections include The Best Philosophers I Know Can't Read and Write (2001). Karl won the prestigious Casa de las Americas Award, 1992; this is a republication of that work.

Author : Suzanne Scafe,Leith L. Dunn
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2024
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0367726149

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African-Caribbean Women Interrogating Diaspora/Post-Diaspora by Suzanne Scafe,Leith L. Dunn Pdf

This book focuses on issues of women's agency and on the potential for transformation produced by the experience of migration and the networks and communities fashioned by African-Caribbean women in diasporic spaces.

Author : Alison Donnell
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2007-05-07
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9781134505869

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Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature by Alison Donnell Pdf

A historiography of Caribbean literary history and criticism, the author explores different critical approaches and textual peepholes to re-examine the way twentieth-century Caribbean literature in English may be read and understood.

Author : Velma Pollard
Publisher : Quartet Books (UK)
Page : 102 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 1989
Category : Social Science
ISBN : UOM:39015025343503

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Considering Woman by Velma Pollard Pdf