Taking up the problem of redefining modernity from a Caribbean perspective
rather than assuming that the North Atlantic view of modernity is common, Maria Cristina
Fumagalli exhibits how the Caribbean's contributions to the trendy international not just supply a more
exact account of the previous but in addition have the aptitude to alter the best way we imagine
the longer term. Fumagalli makes use of the parable of Medusa's gaze turning humans into stone to explain the
manner North Atlantic modernity freezes its "others" right into a kingdom of perpetual backwardness that
produces an ethnocentric narrative in response to homogenization, vilification, and disempowerment
that actively ignores what fails to comply to the tale it desires to inform approximately itself. In
studying narratives of modernity that originate within the Caribbean, the writer explores the
region's refusal to succumb to Medusa's spell and highlights its innovations to outstare the
Gorgon.

Reflecting a range of texts, genres, and media, the chapters concentration on
sixteenth-century engravings and work from the Netherlands and Italy, a systematic romance
produced on the flip of the 20th century by way of the king of the Caribbean island Redonda,
modern collections of poetry from the anglophone Caribbean, a old novel by way of the
Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé, a Latin epic, a Homeric hymn, historical Egyptian rites,
fairy stories, romances from England and Jamaica, a protracted narrative poem through the Nobel Prize winner
Derek Walcott, and work by means of artists from Europe and the Americas spanning the seventeenth
century to the current. Caribbean views on Modernity offers an
unique and artistic contribution to what it capability to be modern.