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Self-consuming Fictions

The Dialectics of Cannibalism in Modern Caribbean Narratives

Bibliographic Data

ID16715488
AuthorsEugenio Matibag (corresponding author)
Year1991
Volume1
Issue3
Publication date1991-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePostmodern Culture (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1053-1920 • E-ISSN: 1053-1920
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/pmc.1991.0017
OpenAlexW2081237989
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited10

Howling words of fresh blood to spark the sacred fire of the world, Aime Cesaire in 1939 claimed kinship with madness and cannibalism. In Cesaire's view, colonialism and western rationality had imposed a falsely barbaric identity --or, in effect, a non-identity--upon the peoples that Europe had uprooted, subjugated, enslaved and otherwise mastered. Against the Eurocentrist representation of American otherness, Cesaire, within his poem's ritual of parthenogenesis, prophetically identified with that otherness, subsuming it into his apocalyptic redefinition of Afro-Antillean selfhood. By such iconoclastic gestures, Cesaire and numerous other writers of the region have demonstrated the manner in which poetic self-identification can mean empowerment in providing the starting point for resisting the cultural annihilation of colonialism. My aim in this essay will be to account for some of the ways in which Cesaire's "cannibalisme tenace" has indeed persisted, tenaciously and obsessively, in modern Caribbean narratives concerned with the question of critiquing and constructing a post-colonial cultural identity

Aesthetics · Art · Caribbean literature · Colonialism · Dialectic · Epistemology · Ethnology · Hybridity · Identity (music · Indigenous · Literature · Narrative · Poetry · Sociology · Anthropology · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · History · Literature, Magical Realism, García Márquez · Philosophy

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Unique citing works1
Citations per year0,04
Citation span2002 - 2002 (1)
Citation velocityhistorical
Highly citedNo

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