Islands in the Air: Travelling by Plane in Anglophone Caribbean Literature

Neigh, Janet

doi:10.1353/ari.2018.0000

Cited by 7 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…(2) For studies on mobility practices in African/Afrodiasporic literatures, see, e.g., (Ní Loingsigh 2009;Steiner 2014;Upstone 2014;Savonick 2015;Forsdick 2016;Mazauric 2016;Green-Simms 2017;Neigh 2018;Toivanen 2021).…”

Section: Conclusion: Aeromobilities and The Making Of The Diasporic Rmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Aeromobility captures ideas such as freedom of movement and the compression of time and space but also the proliferation of borders. Much like other modern mobile technologies, aeromobility carries the legacy of colonial modernity (see, e.g., Foster 2003;Pirie 2004;Aguiar 2011;Green-Simms 2017;Neigh 2018). Indeed, 'air voyage remains subject to hierarchical and colonialist logics of power and exclusion' (Durante 2020, 11).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…(7) Representations of aeromobility have been largely neglected by postcolonial literary scholars. For some of the exceptions, see Neigh (2018); Ní Loingsigh ( 2009); Toivanen (2020). MacArthur ( 2012) and Durante (2020) also discuss some 'postcolonial' texts.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Aeromobilities of diasporic returnees in Francophone African literatures

Toivanen

2021

Mobilities

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Postcolonial literary studies have not paid much attention to literary portrayals of mobility practices partly because the field promotes a reductive understanding of 'mobility' as a mere synonym for migration. In order to address this blind spot and to recognise African fictional characters as mobile subjects, the present article focuses on representations of aeromobility in Francophone African literary texts narrating diasporic returnees' journeys back to their former home countries. As my analysis of five Francophone African return narratives from the 1980s to the 2010s suggests, the aeromobilities of Afrodiasporic returnees are marked by a sense of unease that relates to the issues of (un)belonging and guilt, failures of modernity of the postcolonial nation-state, and the unrealistic expectations that those 'back home' have about migrant life. The article underlines the importance of aeromobility in the production of the mobile subjectivity of the returnee and their relationship with the place of return.

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Section: Conclusion: Aeromobilities and The Making Of The Diasporic Rmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Aeromobilities of diasporic returnees in Francophone African literatures

Toivanen

2021

Mobilities

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“…Archipelagic thinking, a relational mode actively promoted by many island studies scholars (see e.g. Martínez-San Miguel & Stephens, 2020;Xie et al, 2020;Baldacchino, 2016;Pugh, 2013;Stratford, 2013;Stratford et al, 2011;Fletcher, 2011;DeLoughrey, 2007DeLoughrey, , 2004DeLoughrey, , 2001Hau'ofa, 1994;Gilroy, 1993), foregrounds the fluidity, diversity, and dynamic state of the archipelago, thereby disrupting binarism, dichotomies, and the static form. It stresses "a respect for otherness that stands in stark opposition to the conceptual tyranny of Western thought" (Poiana, 2008, p. 174) and implies "an awareness of the collectivity and interconnectivity of other islands in the archipelago (and hence other subjects in society), which become the nodes of constant movement and exchange, both geographically and culturally" (Ashcroft, 2017, p. 148).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spaces of resistance and transformation: Caribbean islands between dystopia and creolotopia in Wide Sargasso Sea

Su¹,

Huang²

2022

ISJ

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Jean Rhys’s best-known novel Wide Sargasso Sea, writing back to Charlotte Brontë’s classic Jane Eyre, is set in the exuberant natural world of the post-emancipation Caribbean. Despite its harsh depiction of cruelty, self-deception, and hypocrisy in the human world, the novel conveys a sympathetic impression of Caribbean society. The novel’s utopian/dystopian tension is centered on its imagining of the Caribbean as a paradoxical site of coexisting dystopia and creolotopia. This article focuses on spaces lived in by individual characters, aiming to show that Wide Sargasso Sea’s Caribbean islands can be read as both dystopian spaces of resistance and creolotopian spaces of transformation. Counter to colonial utopian imaginary, the tropical islands in the novel are presented as an evil, ugly, and diseased world for both white colonizers and the colonized, yet they are simultaneously portrayed as a special Caribbean creolotopia formed through archipelagic thinking and the process of creolization, as embodied in the lived experiences of the black woman Christophine. By resisting the binarism of victim/victimizer and envisioning utopia and creolotopia in the same space, the novel subverts the binary thinking that dominates Western epistemology.

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“…Attending to air travel – a trope explored much less than its nautical equivalent in Caribbean fiction – Janet Neigh (2018) traces colonial fantasies in aviation history and the creative avoidance of airports and aerial routes and perspectives in Anglophone Caribbean fiction, with stories of migration jumping from Trinidad to New York or characters leaving airport lounges during flight delays, for example. Writing by Earl Lovelace, Dionne Brand and Makeda Silvera, Neigh argues, attends to the “lived realities” (4) of airports and airplanes, disrupting hegemonic conceptions of the former as “symbols of globalization and futurity” (6) as well as the dominance of the Empire Windrush ship in the imagination of Caribbean departures and returns and in the critical formulations of the development of Caribbean literature.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2018

Parashkevova¹

2019

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

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Islands in the Air: Travelling by Plane in Anglophone Caribbean Literature

Cited by 7 publications

References 11 publications

Aeromobilities of diasporic returnees in Francophone African literatures

Aeromobilities of diasporic returnees in Francophone African literatures

Spaces of resistance and transformation: Caribbean islands between dystopia and creolotopia in Wide Sargasso Sea

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2018

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