Archipelagic Aesthetics: Reading Caribbean and Filipino Affinities

By Kathleen DeGuzman

The Caribbean and the Philippines seem worlds apart, but geographically they are both archipelagoes: comprised of seas and islands. Using the archipelago as a starting point for analyzing literature and film from the Caribbean and the Philippines, Kathleen DeGuzman offers a bold rethinking of postcolonial narrative styles. Archipelagic Aesthetics: Reading Caribbean and Filipino Affinities pursues a comparative study of two narrative traditions, both born in the decline of the Spanish empire at the end of the nineteenth century, that are rarely placed side by side.

Examining the shared aesthetics of twentieth-century and contemporary fiction, film, and poetry by Sam Selvon, Jessica Hagedorn, Tom s Guti rrez Alea, Elaine Castillo, Erna Brodber, Janice Lobo Sapigao, and more, this book presents nuanced readings of stylistic practices so as to recognize the "archipelagic affinities" that animate these works. All too often, scholars have positioned postcolonial narrative tactics as derivative or "lesser" imitations of colonial styles. Similarly problematic are attempts to find a "true" aesthetic untainted by foreign influences, often a reductive effort to distance colonial trauma from modern thought. Instead, this book analyzes works from the Caribbean and the Philippines in between these extremes, highlighting a beauty and authenticity within a postcolonial identity of "fragmentation."

Structured by four creative tactics--visuality, re-distortion, vernaculars, and kinship--Archipelagic Aesthetics shows how Caribbean and Filipino writers and filmmakers reimagine their relationships to colonial-era misrepresentations and assert the authenticity of their formal, generative practices. Departing from the assumption that the primary concern of postcolonial aesthetics involves projects of recuperation and correction, DeGuzman defines a reading practice for relishing in the pleasures of narrative logics crafted from an archipelagic perspective. By naming the unexpected affinities between Caribbean and Filipino cultural productions, this book charts the importance of both the archipelago as a geographical form and aesthetics as a domain of knowledge within postcolonial literary studies.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H75Q219D
• ISBN13: 9798880703395
• Release Date: March 2027
• Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
• Length: 160 Pages