Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Idle Talk, Deadly Talk : The Uses of Gossip in Caribbean Literature
Files
Download Full Text
Description
Chaucer called it "spiritual manslaughter"; Barthes and Benjamin deemed it dangerous linguistic nihilism. But gossip-long derided and dismissed by writers and intellectuals-is far from frivolous. In Idle Talk, Deadly Talk, Ana Rodríguez Navas reveals gossip to be an urgent, utilitarian, and deeply political practice-a means of staging the narrative tensions, and waging the narrative battles, that mark Caribbean politics and culture. From the calypso singer's superficially innocent rhymes to the vicious slanders published in Trujillo-era gossip columns, words have been weapons, elevating one person or group at the expense of another. Revising the overly gendered existing critical frame, Rodríguez Navas argues that gossip is a fundamentally adversarial practice. Just as whispers and hearsay corrosively define and surveil identities, they also empower writers to skirt sanitized, monolithic historical accounts by weaving alternative versions of their nations' histories from this self-governing discursive material. Reading recent fiction from the Hispanic, Anglophone, and Francophone Caribbean and their diasporas, alongside poetry, song lyrics, journalism, memoirs, and political essays, Idle Talk, Deadly Talk maps gossip's place in the Caribbean and reveals its rich possibilities as both literary theme and narrative device. As a means for mediating contested narratives, both public and private, gossip emerges as a vital resource for scholars and writers grappling with the region's troubled history.
ISBN
9780813941622
Publication Date
10-1-2018
Publisher
University of Virginia Press
City
Charlottesville, Virginia, USA
Keywords
Gossip, Caribbean literature, Literature, Postcolonialism
Disciplines
Caribbean Languages and Societies | Latin American Languages and Societies | Modern Languages | Modern Literature
Recommended Citation
Navas, Ana Rodriguez, "Idle Talk, Deadly Talk : The Uses of Gossip in Caribbean Literature" (2018). Faculty Books. 236.
https://ecommons.luc.edu/facultybooks/236
