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 global not just supply a more
exact account of the earlier but in addition have the capability to alter the way we imagine
the long run. Fumagalli makes use of the parable of Medusa's gaze turning humans into stone to explain the
method North Atlantic modernity freezes its "others" right into a country of perpetual backwardness that
produces an ethnocentric narrative in keeping with 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 ancient novel by means of the
Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé, a Latin epic, a Homeric hymn, historic Egyptian rites,
fairy stories, romances from England and Jamaica, a protracted narrative poem via the Nobel Prize winner
Derek Walcott, and work by way 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 ability to be modern.