Symbolic Cities in Caribbean Literature [Hardcover]

Utilizing cross-cultural strands, this comparative study analyzes Caribbean literary representations of magic and invisible cities reworking the notion of the city as both instituted social space and imaginary community.Thalassal Histories Building the Magic City Containing the Ancestral House: The Literary Legacies of Marronage Two, Three, Many Havanas: Ventures into a Repeating City City of Dis or City of Renewal?

We have in Winks' Symbolic Cities in Caribbean Literature a remarkable, almost encyclopedic, encounter and literary elucidation of intense and salient aspects of Caribbean culture in all its variety, resulting in a major contribution to Caribbean hermeneutics and thinking. - Kamau Brathwaite, New York University

Winks symbolic cities are culturally imagined places, myths, where people come, exchange and live together (expansively or oppressively - notable ones being Soninke Wagadu and Euro-American El Dorado) to establish, or try to establish, one reality from many localities . . .Here and in like places such magic cities are figures tying myth to local history and the experience of colonial oppression to the creation of a (potentially) new cultural actuality, ultimately portraying the establishment of a new Caribbean culture and its difficult removal from the impress of colonial hegemony. Symbolic Cities is a superb piece of scholarly research and literary analysis, a major contribution to Caribbean criticism, rooted in Caribbean theoretical understanding, historical sensibility and situation and political commitment, even as it is embedded in wider global considerations. - Timothy J. Reiss, New York University

If scope and precision, the use of detail to illuminate the whole, are signs of a Renaissance mind, then Winks mind is Renaissance. His Symbolic Citiesin Caribbean Literature deals vastly and simultaneously with the City as Utopia, as an established real space to a living community, and as an imagil£&