Caribbean Perspectives on Modernity: Returning Medusa's Gaze (2010)

Caribbean Perspectives on Modernity: Returning Medusa's Gaze, by Maria Cristina Fumagalli. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009. ISBN 0-8139-2858-6. 198pp. $22.50 paper. Fumagalli's intervention into modern discourses argues for a redefinition of modernity's ethnocentric and hegemonizing tendencies into a more transactional and exchange-based dialectic unearths the Caribbean's active role the production of North Atlantic modernity. This latter phrase of Fumagalli's invention designates a cluster of dominant discourses do not necessarily belong exclusively to and are not the only discourses circulated the area (2). Pivotal to this project is the Medusa myth; Fumagalli deploys the Gorgon's immobilizing gaze as an expethent for describing how North Atlantic modernity sustains itself by actively silencing who and what does not conform to its modes of representation. Reconfiguring modernity Fumagalli's work is thus likened to out-staring Medusa, and like Perseus, returning the immobilizing gaze by reflecting it back unto itself. The texts discussed are varied and arguably disparate, but solid continuities are established throughout, which turn underlie Fumagalli's argument for the Caribbean's contribution to defining and redefining North Atlantic modernity. These works are diverse in terms of media, genre, and provenance and are used to construct a discourse enacts the refusal to succumb to Medusa's gaze, which marginalizes and immobilizes which does not conform to the Gorgon. Fumagalli's argument is consistently aware of the disparateness of the media she explores and turn manages to skillfully outline the points of comparison and departure without flattening the unique specificities surrounding each work under comparison. Thus, this book explores the influence of the Caribbean on art, literature, philosophy, and culture to posit modernity as the outcome of exchange, negotiation, and transculturation, rather than solely within the rhetoric of conquest, discovery, and encounter. Fumagalli identifies her purpose as showing that the Caribbean 'non-modern others' whom North Atlantic modernity creates and then petrifies, objectifies, abjectifies, and subalternizes do not desire to exist its gaze but actually have and always have had a character and a purpose of their own as well as their own views on what it means to be modern(9). Chapter one begins with a comparison between Stradanus' America and Grace Nichols fat black and long-memoried woman. Fumagalli posits the personal and collective memory of the traditionally unheard as essential to recovering modernity's occluded past. By reading Stradanus' 16th century depiction of America alongside Nichols' twentieth-century depictions of the Black female body, Fumagalli offers a compelling reading of the longstanding symbolic dimensions and discourses representing, reading, and writing New World subjectivity and subaltern-ness. She effectively juxtaposes popular readings of Stradanus' America by de Certeau, Hulme, and McClintock with her own reading centers on America's outward gaze and active posture. Using the motif of breasts exposed the face of history as a line of continuity between Nichols' and Stradanus' work, Fumagalli deftly conveys the ways America (the New World and its unheard subjects) can be read alternatively as potentially unmanageable and insurrectionist, and challenges North Atlantic modern readings emphasize compliance and mute subaltern-ness. Fumagalli repeatedly uses Marshall Berman's three distinct phases of modernity throughout the book to illustrate what Berman's template omits, what it includes, and how it contributes to processes of muting modernity's subalterns. Noticeably absent from Berman's Eurocentric template, for example, are the Haitian and American revolutions. Referring to Berman's framework allows Fumagalli to show modernity's investment the homogenous projection of solidly ethnocentric visions functionally ostracize whatever does not conform to its vision of itself. …