Focusing on the literary representation of performance practices in
anglophone, francophone, and hispanophone Caribbean literature, Jeannine Murray-Román shows
how a shared regional aesthetic emerges from the descriptions of music, dance, and oral
storytelling events. Because the historical circumstances that led to the development of
performance traditions supersede the geopolitical and linguistic divisions of colonialism, the
literary uses of these traditions resonate across the linguistic boundaries of the region. The
author thus identifies the aesthetic that emerges from the act of writing about live arts and
moving bodies as a practice that is grounded in the historically, geographically, and culturally
specific features of the Caribbean itself. Working with twentieth- and
twenty-first-century sources ranging from theatrical works and novels to blogs,
Murray-Román examines the ways in which writers such as Jacques Stephen Alexis, Zoé
Valdés, Rosario Ferré, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Marlon James experiment with textually
compensating for the loss of the corporeality of live relationship in performance traditions.
Through their exploration of the interaction of literature and performance, she argues,
Caribbean writers themselves offer a mode of bridging the disjunction between cultural and
philosophical approaches within Caribbean studies.