On Tropical Grounds develops a new approach to the avant-garde and Surrealism in Caribbean and Atlantic studies. The book examines how islands and their tropical associations figure in the cultural and political imaginaries of the Caribbean and the Atlantic, and identifies genealogies of local responses to continental fantasies of exotic insularity. Examining written and visual works that reflect on the Hispanic and Francophone Caribbean and the Canary Islands, as well as critical debates around discourses of insularity in island and metropolitan spaces, this book considers notions of ethnic purity, originality, imitation, appropriation, cosmopolitanism, and self-exoticism to challenge the idea that avant-garde practices were pre-eminently urban and metropolitan cultural forms.

The book argues that attention to the relational dimension implicit in exchanges around ideas of anticolonial struggle, radical social transformation, and anti-fascist resistance should inform analyses of cultural production in Caribbean and Atlantic insular spaces. On Tropical Grounds develops a persuasive critical model for the investigation of politically and aesthetically situated archipelagic relations that transgresses disciplinary boundaries and reconfigures our conception of the avant-garde as a global movement that was overdetermined by racial, gender, and colonial conflicts.

This book will be of value to anyone interested in Caribbean and Atlantic studies, avant-garde and visual culture studies, and literary and cultural studies.

About the Author
Francisco-J. Hernandez Adrian is Professor of Hispanic and Visual Culture Studies at Durham University.

Reviews

"On Tropical Grounds executes a cultural, intellectual, and literary history of striking depth and inimitable originality. Avant-garde canons of knowledge are constellated as they separate but hold together the idea of island, islandness, and insularity running through the Hispanic and Francophone Caribbean and the Canary Islands. This mosaic of resounding thoughts is literary and visual theory, not of a particular time, but it is a vital reference for our time. It is a must-read for all those who are thinking about the Caribbean and the Atlantic world vis-a-vis dynamic but often hard-to-articulate traces, disruptive spaces, conceptual grasps."
Claudia Milian, Duke University

Book Information
ISBN 9781509561667
Author Francisco-J. Hernandez Adrian
Format Hardback
Page Count 288
Imprint Polity Press
Publisher John Wiley and Sons Ltd