Reviews for Caribbean Genesis: Jamaica Kincaid and the Writing of New Worlds

The average rating for Caribbean Genesis: Jamaica Kincaid and the Writing of New Worlds based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-09-18 00:00:00 James Lizotte Fairly valuable though badly titled book about early U.S. literature. The subject is attitudes toward ownership of land, particularly in white dispossession of Native Americans, not attitudes toward nature as a system, which is how I typically use "environmental." Of course the book recognizes that disputes over land ownership involved disputes over the proper use of the land. Each chapter looks at how three or four related texts from a shorter time period talk about land. The author doesn't make clear why he picks these particular books. There's no obvious reason why they go together, and I don't know enough about early U.S. literature to tell if there are non-obvious ones. The only one I've read any of is Lewis and Clark's journals; the ones I'd most like to read are the writings of the botanists, Jane Colden and William Bartram. It's too bad Hallock's Latin isn't better, since it would have saved him some mistakes and garblings. The main commonality that shows up has to do with the "middle ground" where Euro-Americans and Native Americans interacted; the farther the writers get from day-to-day facts, the more they deny the middle ground in favor of absolute distinctions between uninhabited nature and civilization.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-10-21 00:00:00 Matthew Cardello This extraordinary book describes the collision of man and nature, narrative and history, and explores the attempts of "fronteir" and "pastoral" writers to navigate and assimilate foreign environs. I can't do it justice, but students of literature and environmentalism will love it.