Literature and Culture in the Black Atlantic: From Pre- to Postcolonial [Hardcover]

This book extends our understanding of the black Atlantic, a term coined by Paul Gilroy to describe the political, cultural and creative interrelations among blacks living in Africa, the Americas and Europe. This study focuses on pre-colonial English literary constructions and their effects on post-Independence Caribbean literature.Introduction The Postcolonial Middle Ages? This Project Beginnings 1: Africa in the European Imaginary Beginnings 2: Africa in the Middle English Vernacular De Proprietatibus Rerum and the African Primitive It was Ours to Begin With: Colonialist Desire in The Three Kings of Cologne What Does it Mean to be Black?: Skin Colour in the Secretum Secretorum 'Ethiops like the develes of helle': Monster Theory, Giants, and the Sowdone of Babylone Mandeville's Africa Textual Relationships On the Crest of Two Worlds: The Renaissance Pre-colonial Old Traditions in a New World: The Extended Dream Narrative of Wilson Harris' Guyana Quartet Mimicry and Identity on the Black Atlantic: Derek Walcott's Dream on Monkey Mountain Closing the Rhetorical Circle: 'Heat' and 'Coldness' in Paul Keens-Douglas Ent Dat Nice Closing the Black Atlantic Circle: David Dabydeen and the Politics of Nationalism Conclusion Works Cited

'There is much to admire in Literature and Culture in the Black Atlantic: its erudition, its originality, its verve. What sets Campbell's book apart is its sophisticated deployment of Caribbean-derived models of hybridity and time, and its twinned emphasis on Africa in the medieval imagination and the contemporary Black Atlantic. Campbell's scholarship is an important and ambitious contribution; absolutely essential reading for medievalists and postcolonial theorists alike.' - Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Professor of English, George Washington University, author of The Postcolonial Middle Ages and Hybridity, Identity and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain

'In Kofi Campbell's Literature and Culture in the Black Atlantic we hal#7