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The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context J. Michael Dash. The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1998. xii + 197 pp.
Michael Dash is an accomplished critical interpreter of the ideas of the Martinican poet and theorist Edouard Glissant, whose formulations are here brought together in a brilliant reading of French Caribbean literary history. He extends Glissant into the world of academic writing, much as the novelist Patrick Chamoiseau may be said to have brought Glissant's ideas into the prose narrative with such works as Solibo Magnificent (1988) and Texaco (1992), novels now available in the rich English translations of Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokurov.
Dash begins with the fact that some other writers and critics have accused the Martinicans Glissant and Chamoiseau of excessive attachment to the mère patrie, in that their revisionist ideas of the Creolité movement have been formulated as creatively...