Working Juju examines how fantastical and unreal modes are deployed in portrayals of the Caribbean in popular and literary culture as well as in the visual arts.
The Caribbean has historically been constructed as a region mantled by the fantastic. Andrea Shaw Nevins analyzes such imaginings of the Caribbean and interrogates the freighting of Caribbean-infused spaces with characteristics that register as fantastical. These fantastical traits may be described as magical, supernatural, uncanny, paranormal, mystical and speculative. The book asks throughout, “What are the discursive threads that run through texts featuring the Caribbean fantastic?”
In Working Juju, Nevins teases out the multi-layered and often obscured connections among texts such as the Pirates of the Caribbean film series, planter and historian Edward Long’s History of Jamaica and Grenadian sci-fi writer Tobias Buckell’s Xenowealth series set in the future Caribbean.
