On ruins in Caribbean Literature

Anna Jörngården, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, has written a chapter in the new book Literary Landscapes of Time: Multiple Temporalities and Spaces in Latin American and Caribbean Literatures (De Gruyter).

In the chapter “Presencing Absence: Ruin as Counter-Monument in Caribbean Literature” Anna Jörngården takes her cue from the recent political debates on monuments, and draws on influential cultural theories of ruins and material memory to discuss ruins as media of counter-memory in a series of representative writings from the Caribbean, in which the fragmented and half-buried colonial past comes to the fore and thereby challenges the monumental history of the colonizer, by turning absence into presence.

Anna Jörngården.

Anna Jörngården is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics.

Theme

Culture and Media

Research subject

Comparative and transnational perspectives in and on literature

Research group

Cultural memory studies

What is the cultural significance of memory? How and why do we remember the past, not only as individuals but across generations, as social and cultural communities? And how do these memory practices relate to politically and emotionally charged questions of national or ethnic identity, historical traumas, and experiences of dislocation, loss and forgetting?

Ruins of houses destroyed by bombardment

Last updated: December 5, 2022

Source: Department of Culture and Aesthetics