Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination

by Sarah Phillips Casteel

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231174404
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	01/12/2016
Series:	Literature Now
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Sarah Phillips Casteel is associate professor of English at Carleton University, where she holds a cross-appointment with the Institute of African Studies. She is the author of Second Arrivals: Landscape and Belonging in Contemporary Writing of the Americas and coeditor, with Winfried Siemerling, of Canada and Its Americas: Transnational Navigations.

Table of Contents

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

What People are Saying About This

Michael Rothberg

Calypso Jews reveals how a generation of postwar Caribbean novelists transformed literary genres and created an underappreciated archive of transcultural memory. Lucidly written and argued with nuance, this doubly necessary study is a must read for students of both the Black and Jewish Atlantic.

Bryan Cheyette

Calypso Jews is the first comprehensive account of the multilayered relationship between diasporic Jews and the Caribbean. It is lucidly written and has a historical reach from 1492 to the Holocaust. Always open to the nuances of modern and contemporary Caribbean poetics, Calypso Jews is highly informative and helps rethink many topics ranging from Black-Jewish relations to creolization theory, from slave narratives to Holocaust diaries.

From the Publisher

"What Sarah Casteel offers in Calypso Jews is nothing short of a radical new way of looking at inter-diasporic Jewish and Black relations in the Caribbean. While her main object are the literary productions of writers as varied as Caryl Philips, Derek Walcott, Michelle Cliff and others, the fact that she situates the literary representation of Jews in the Caribbean within the two contexts of 1492 and the Holocaust means that she is to invoke different resonances that play across the cultural imaginary of the two communities. A highly engaging contribution to literary and diaspora studies."

Calypso Jews is the first comprehensive account of the multilayered relationship between diasporic Jews and the Caribbean. It is lucidly written and has a long historical reach from 1492 to the Holocaust. Always open to the nuances of modern and contemporary Caribbean poetics, Calypso Jews is highly informative and will help the reader rethink many topics ranging from Black-Jewish relations to creolization theory; and from slave narratives to Holocaust diaries.

Sarah Casteel has written an important book that opens up diaspora studies by tracking the entangled histories of blacks and Jews in the Caribbean. Shrewdly organized around two moments of trauma--1492 and the Holocaust--Calypso Jews reveals how a generation of postwar Caribbean novelists transformed literary genres and created an underappreciated archive of transcultural memory. Lucidly written and argued with nuance, this doubly necessary study is a must read for students of both the Black Atlantic and the Jewish Atlantic.

Ato Quayson

What Sarah Phillips Casteel offers in Calypso Jews is nothing short of a radical new way of looking at inter-diasporic Jewish and Black relations in the Caribbean. While her main objects are the literary productions of writers as varied as Caryl Philips, Derek Walcott, Michelle Cliff, and others, the fact that she situates the literary representation of Jews in the Caribbean within the two contexts of 1492 and the Holocaust means she invokes different resonances that play across the cultural imaginary of the two communities. A highly engaging contribution to literary and diaspora studies.

Editorial Reviews

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.

Jewish Book Council - Sharon Elswit

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.

H-Caribbean - Patrick Taylor

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.

The Caribbean Writer - Dr. Mary H. Auerbach-Rykov

A brilliant study.

Small Axe - Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken

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 Leibmann Jewish History

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.

Times Literary Supplement - Ian Thomson

A rich, consequential, powerful work that will make a difference in Jewish and postcolonial studies alike.

Jonathan Freedman

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 Series X

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.

American Jewish History - Laura Arnold Leibman