Goudie Wins MLA Prize for a First Book

The Modern Language Association of America is awarding its fourteenth annual Prize for a First Book to Sean X. Goudie for Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic.

Here is a quote from the selection committee's citation:

Sean X. Goudie opens new doors in his compelling treatment of transnational and transcultural conflict. Based on extensive archival research, and using both historical and analytical frames of reference, his book studies the emergence of an enduring creole complex in America and the Caribbean in the years following the Revolutionary War. In exhuming unsettling affiliations that tie the two worlds in the early stages of American nationhood, the book examines lucidly what Toni Morrison calls racial vulnerability as it was felt and represented among colonizers and colonized alike. It sets the West Indies on the meridian of what is rightly termed an innovative inter-American and cultural cartography in which familiar and improbable places and players are in turmoil.

The award will be presented at the upcoming MLA convention in Chicago.