Böcker av Christina Kullberg

This open access book complicates and develops the notion of the vernacular. Understood in the linguistic sense as well as an element of the local, the vernacular facilitates the exploration of local and global dynamics. Through exploring the unexamined active role of the local, the indigenous, and the periphery in international literary exchanges, this volume argues that a coherent theorization of the vernacular will enable us to do so. The essays in Vernaculars in an Age of World Literatures present new critical approaches in the debate on world literature, which has given priority to cosmopolitan movements, global circulation of literatures, and metropolitan centers. In nine case studies, approaching narratives from the long 20th century from more or less marginal contexts-such as the Francophone Chinese diaspora, multilingual regions in Spain, West Africa, and the Caribbean-the volume offers theoretical and methodological ways of putting the concept of the vernacular in practice and demonstrates how vernaculars operate within different literary, critical, cultural, and political circumstances.The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

Drawing on narratives from Martinique by Aime Cesaire, Edouard Glissant, Ina Csaire, and Patrick Chamoiseau, among others, Christina Kullberg shows how these writers turn to ethnography-even as they critique it-as an exploration and expression of the self. They acknowledge its tradition as a colonial discourse and a study of others, but they also argue for ethnography's advantage in connecting subjectivity to the outside world. Further, they find that ethnography offers the possibility of capturing within the hybrid culture of the Caribbean an emergent self that nonetheless remains attached to its collective history and environment. Rather than claiming to be able to represent the culture they also feel alienated from, these writers explore the relationships between themselves, the community, and the environment. Although Kullberg's focus is on Martinique, her work opens up possibilities for intertextual readings and comparative studies of writers from every linguistic region in the Caribbean-not only francophone but also Hispanic and anglophone. In addition, her interdisciplinary approach extends the reach of her work beyond postcolonial and literary studies to anthropology and ecocriticism.