Calypso Jews
Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination
Columbia University Press
Calypso Jews
Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination
Columbia University Press
In original and insightful ways, Caribbean writers have turned to Jewish experiences of exodus and reinvention, from the Sephardim expelled from Iberia in the 1490s to the "Calypso Jews" who fled Europe for Trinidad in the 1930s. Examining these historical migrations through the lens of postwar Caribbean fiction and poetry, Sarah Phillips Casteel presents the first major study of representations of Jewishness in Caribbean literature. Bridging the gap between postcolonial and Jewish studies, Calypso Jews enriches cross-cultural investigations of Caribbean creolization.
Caribbean writers invoke both the 1492 expulsion and the Holocaust as part of their literary archaeology of slavery and its legacies. Despite the unequal and sometimes fraught relations between Blacks and Jews in the Caribbean before and after emancipation, Black-Jewish literary encounters reflect sympathy and identification more than antagonism and competition. Providing an alternative to U.S.-based critical narratives of Black-Jewish relations, Casteel reads Derek Walcott, Maryse Condé, Michelle Cliff, Jamaica Kincaid, Caryl Phillips, David Dabydeen, and Paul Gilroy, among others, to reveal a distinctive interdiasporic literature.
Caribbean writers invoke both the 1492 expulsion and the Holocaust as part of their literary archaeology of slavery and its legacies. Despite the unequal and sometimes fraught relations between Blacks and Jews in the Caribbean before and after emancipation, Black-Jewish literary encounters reflect sympathy and identification more than antagonism and competition. Providing an alternative to U.S.-based critical narratives of Black-Jewish relations, Casteel reads Derek Walcott, Maryse Condé, Michelle Cliff, Jamaica Kincaid, Caryl Phillips, David Dabydeen, and Paul Gilroy, among others, to reveal a distinctive interdiasporic literature.
A rich, consequential, powerful work that will make a difference in Jewish and postcolonial studies alike. Jonathan Freedman, author of Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity
An engaging and rather unusual study of diaspora Jewry in the West Indies.... [that shines a] bright, exalting light... on the Caribbean and its many different peoples. Ian Thomson, Times Literary Supplement
Throughout Calypso Jews, Casteel makes a case for how hidden Sephardism has captured the imagination of culturally diverse authors post-slavery. The fullness and novelty of her research opens a fascinating dialogue on the intersections of black and Jewish relationships as revealed through Caribbean literature. Sharon Elswit, Jewish Book Council
A path-breaking study.... By bringing a fresh approach to a much-neglected area of scholarship, Casteel has made a major contribution to our understanding of the Caribbean writer's commitment to bearing witness to the traumas of modernity. Patrick Taylor, H-Caribbean
Casteel's richly informative study...shows us that the peoples of the world do not merely trade and compete with, love and harm one another; they also watch each other in history, become compelled by one another’s stories. ALH Online Review
This is a fantastic book that makes a significant contribution to the fields of both Jewish American and Caribbean studies. . . . It also provides an intriguing model of what a truly transnational approach may look like. Laura Arnold Leibman, American Jewish History
This treasure will surely become a classic of Caribbean literary criticism that scholars would be wise to emulate. I am grateful for this groundbreaking exegesis of the Jewish Caribbean / diaspora literary canon. Dr. Mary H. Auerbach-Rykov, The Caribbean Writer
A brilliant study. Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken, Small Axe
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1: 1492
1. Sephardism in Caribbean Literature: Derek Walcott's Pissarro
2. Marranism and Creolization: Myriam Chancy and Michelle Cliff
3. Port Jews in Slavery Fiction: Maryse Condé and David Dabydeen
4. Plantation Jews in Slavery Fiction: Cynthia McLeod's Jodensavanne
Part 2: Holocausts
5. Calypso Jews: John Hearne and Jamaica Kincaid
6. Between Camps: M. NourbeSe Philip and Michèle Maillet
7. Writing Under the Sign of Anne Frank: Michelle Cliff and Caryl Phillips
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Introduction
Part 1: 1492
1. Sephardism in Caribbean Literature: Derek Walcott's Pissarro
2. Marranism and Creolization: Myriam Chancy and Michelle Cliff
3. Port Jews in Slavery Fiction: Maryse Condé and David Dabydeen
4. Plantation Jews in Slavery Fiction: Cynthia McLeod's Jodensavanne
Part 2: Holocausts
5. Calypso Jews: John Hearne and Jamaica Kincaid
6. Between Camps: M. NourbeSe Philip and Michèle Maillet
7. Writing Under the Sign of Anne Frank: Michelle Cliff and Caryl Phillips
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Read the introduction:
Winner, 2016 Canadian Jewish Literary Awards in the Scholarship Category