num_pages: 290
description: Creative writers and critics come together in this major collection of writings about the literature of the Dutch-, English-, French-, and Spanish-speaking Caribbean. It began with the thought that a distinction might be made between a principally anglophone "Sisyphus," representing the task of material, metaphysical, and cultural liberation as a basically pessimistic work of "success" and "achievement," and a francophone and hispanophone "Eldorado," expressed especially in magical realism, as a hope of surpassing material and local familiarities and moving into an altogether different cultural and spiritual dialectic. As its authors worked together and separately, the divisive assumptions of this double theme became clearer even as it offered new ways to set them in mutual conjunction. All Caribbean writing shares and explores what both these names represent. At the same time, their juxtaposition does offer a fruitful way to explore Caribbean culture(s) as a unity with its own distinctive characteristics. Thus this collection discusses works of individual writers as well as wider issues of personal and political identity, of literary and cultural creation in neo- or post-colonial situations, of the meaning of creolity and creolization, of the nature of Caribbean cultural unity, and of how literatures "write back" against others who try to make them in their image. Among the writers considered are Robert Antoni, Erna Brodber, Alejo Carpentier, Aime Cesaire, Wilson Harris, Albert Helman, C. L. R. James, George Lamming, Boeli van Leeuwen, Saint-John Perse, Simon Schwarz-Bart, Derek Walcott, and others. Contributors to the volume include Gerard Aching, A. James Arnold, Antonio Benitez-Rojo, Erna Brodber, John Chioles, Rhonda Cobham, Maryse Condé, Joan Dayan, Wilson Harris, the late André Lefevere, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Ineke Phaf, Timothy Reiss, Silvio Torres-Saillant, and Sylvia Wynter.
language: English
title: Sisyphus and Eldorado: Magical and Other Realisms in Caribbean Literature
titlecomplete: Sisyphus and Eldorado: Magical and Other Realisms in Caribbean Literature
publisher: Africa World Pr