Founding Fictions of the Dutch Caribbean [Paperback]

Cola Debrot (Author), Boeli van Leeuwen (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0820488194 | ISBN-13: 978-0820488196 | Publication Date: February 9, 2007

Colat Debrot’s "My Black Sister" and Boeli van Leeuwen’s are two pivotal works from the early period of postcolonial Dutch-language fiction from the Dutch Caribbean. Each portrays different aspects of the predicament of postcolonial identity, gender, race, and politics in the vein best known as "tropic existentialism." Founding Fictions of the Dutch Caribbean is suitable for courses on Caribbean literature and postcolonial literature, and will be of great interest to readers of fiction in general.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

"This book of painstaking translation signifies an increasingly flourishing and highly welcomed interest in the literature of the Dutch Caribbean. It will delight readers with its poignant renderings of the sheer poetry of its source texts, their lush tropical imagination, and searing exposures of conflicted postcolonial subjectivity. This is a book you will read over and over again, and then again." Maurice A. Lee, Editor, Journal of Caribbean Literatures; Dean, College of Liberal Arts, University of Central Arkansas

"Founding Fictions of the Dutch Caribbean brings to English language readers well-wrought translations of two seminal writers of the Dutch Caribbean, Cola De-brot and Boeli van Leeuwen. Widely acclaimed by readers of Dutch, evincing pow-erful dimensions of postcolonial reality and imagination, these are works of world significance with their rare beauty, sultry grace, and profound human compassion." Aart G. Broek, Author of Het Zilt van de Passaten and De Kleur van mijn Eiland

About the Author

Olga E. Rojer teaches in the Department of Language and Foreign Studies at American University in Washington, D.C. She received her Ph.D. in [add subject] from the University of Maryland. She is the author of Exile in Argentina: 1933–1945 (Peter Lang, 1989). Her collaborative translations with Joeseph O. Aimone of Dutch and Papiamentu literature from Curaçao have been published widely.

Joseph O. Aimone teaches in the Department of English at the University of Houston Downtown. He received his Ph.D. in [add subject] from the University of California at Davis. His collaborative translations with Olga E. Rojer of Dutch and Papiamentu literature from Curaçao have been published widely. He has also published poetry and literary criticism.

Product Details

• Paperback: 158 pages
• Publisher: Peter Lang Publishing (February 9, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0820488194
• ISBN-13: 978-0820488196
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,806,871 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful moving stories, October 3, 2010

By 

Roger Smith (CT, United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Founding Fictions of the Dutch Caribbean (Paperback)

Before a first visit to Curacao I decided to get this book to help me better understand what I would see. This is a wonderful book which deserves to be better known. The two stories tell of a tangled web between the islands' colonial past and multi-ethnic present. Of the two, "Stranger on Earth" was the more substantial and surprising, about a disaffected young man of Dutch heritage who leaves the island for the Netherlands only to find dullness, decay and despair. The story doesn't end there and takes him to a love affair in macho, Catholic Spain and back to the island as he searches for a meaningful life. I'd love to read more by Van Leeuwen.