Hybrid Aesthetics and Social Reality: Reading Caribbean Literature in the Postcolonial Present

Abstract

With the work of authors such as Édouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau,Edwidge Danticat, Earl Lovelace, Junot Díaz, Maryse Condé, Antonio Benítez-Rojo,or Dany Laferrière, Caribbean literature looks back on a prolific and influential tra-dition of‘hybrid’aesthetics and transcultural social realism. Simultaneously, con-temporary literary and cultural scholarship is increasingly becoming aware of itspost-postcolonial and post-postmodernist condition, deferring text-immanent argu-ments of deterritorialisation, agency, or representation for the sake of a more mate-rial criticism which questions the very premises of our modern social systems. Theconcept of a minor universality reflects this necessity. Against this backdrop, thepresent paper investigates the potential of critics such as Jacques Rancière, StuartHall, Pierre Bourdieu, and Shalini Puri to both (re)read the aforementioned tradi-tion and also approach the present generation of Caribbean writers.