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Isabel Allende has always been obsessed with what enhances the passionate life. With "Afrodita", a combination of personal narrative and treasury of erotic lore, she becomes an authority on aphrodisiacs, which include everything from food and drink to stories and, of course, love. Here, readers will discover recipes from Allende's mother, poems, stories from ancient and medieval literature, paintings, fascinating tidbits on the sensual art of food, tips on how to attract one's mate, passages on the effect of smell on the libido, and more.

Allende's rich celebration of the pleasures of the sensual life offers an irresistible read that combines personal narrative and a treasury of erotic lore to deliver a joyous book about the delights of food and sex. Color illustrations throughout.

In "Bending The Light, his second volume of verse, Reni A. Martin trains his lens unflinchingly on interior landscapes, the contours of which have been powerfully influenced by memory.

The poems, often tinged with nostalgia, are a tribute to formative influences of his youth in Trinidad, his island homeland. They trace the emergence of a distinctive poetic vision. There are three sections to the book.

Part one explores experiences such as going to hear a police orchestra play classical music, a family vacation at a coastal village, and the pains of separation from loved ones.

The poems of part two recall and examine memorable experiences of his school years.

In part three, the poems lay bare the myriad emotions stirred up by viewing photographs in an old family album.

The themes, though rooted in memory, transcend time and geography and ultimately affirm a shared humanity.

Kamau Brathwaite, who won the 1994 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, has revised his celebrated 1979 Casa de las Americas collection, Black + Blues, for its first edition by a U.S. publisher. A rich and beautiful collection, Black + Blues is cast in three parts - "Fragments", "Drought", and "Flowers".

Twayne's United States Authors, English Authors, and World Authors Series present concise critical introductions to great writers and their works.

Devoted to critical interpretation and discussion of an author's work, each study takes account of major literary trends and important scholarly contributions and provides new critical insights with an original point of view. An Authors Series volume addresses readers ranging from advanced high school students to university professors. The book suggests to the informed reader new ways of considering a writer's work.

Each volume features:

-- A critical, interpretive study and explication of the author's works

-- A brief biography of the author

-- An accessible chronology outlining the life, the work, and relevant historical context

-- Aids for further study: complete notes and references, a selected annotated bibliography and an index

-- A readable style presented in a manageable length

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A long overdue look at the central role Black studies has played within academic life and culture, this volume explains how, as a truly transdisciplinary field, Black studies brought nonwhite Barbies, the pragmatics of political activism, and profound educational initiatives into the classroom.

Charcoal and Cinnamon explores the continuing redefinition of women of African descent in the Caribbean, focusing on the manner in which literature has influenced their treatment and contributed to the formation of their shifting identities.

While various studies have explored this subject, much of the existing research harbors a blindness to the literature of the non-English-speaking territories. Claudette Williams bases her analyses on poetry and prose from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic and enhances it by comparing these writings with the literatures of the English- and French-speaking Caribbean territories.

Williams also questions the tendency of some of the established schools of feminism to de-emphasize the factor of race in their gender analyses. A novel aspect of this work, indicated by the allusion to "charcoal" and "cinnamon" in its title, is its focus on the ways in which many writers use language to point to subtle distinctions between black and brown (mulatto) women.

The originality of Williams's approach is also evident in her emphasis on the writer's attitudes toward race rather than on the writer's race itself. She brings to the emotionally charged subject of the politics of color the keen analysis and sustained research of a scholar, as well as the perceptive personal insights of an African-ancestored Caribbean woman.

Though the main focus is on literary works, the book will also be a valuable reference for courses on Caribbean history, sociology, and psychology.

Expanding our perspective on the diversity and consequences of the African Diaspora, Douglas Armstrong explores life in the Virgin Islands for a distinctive black community that gained its freedom from slavery more than 40 years prior to emancipation in 1848. The isolated rural settlement on the far east end of the island of St. John developed within the colonial setting and included primarily, but not exclusively, people of color. Armstrong examines its transformation from a group of small cotton and provisioning estates to community-held and family-owned parcels, and he traces spatial and economic shifts over a period of more than 150 years. The author discusses the region's geography and history and also addresses topics such as maritime trade and exchange, gender roles, and community interrelationships. Utilizing information from extensive archaeological excavations at selected households, Armstrong analyzes an array of documents, including deeds, cash books, and census, tax, and harbor records. Creole Transformation from Slavery to Freedom offers a rare glimpse of how a free Caribbean culture emerged from an 18th-century plantation society. Important to scholars interested in Caribbean peoples and their transformations, this illustrated book also will appeal to scholars of the African Diaspora.

As Louisiana and Cuba emerged from slavery in the late nineteenth century, each faced the question of what rights former slaves could claim. "Degrees of Freedom" compares and contrasts these two societies in which slavery was destroyed by war, and citizenship was redefined through social and political upheaval. Both Louisiana and Cuba were rich in sugar plantations that depended on an enslaved labor force. After abolition, on both sides of the Gulf of Mexico, ordinary people--cane cutters and cigar workers, laundresses and labor organizers--forged alliances to protect and expand the freedoms they had won. But by the beginning of the twentieth century, Louisiana and Cuba diverged sharply in the meanings attributed to race and color in public life, and in the boundaries placed on citizenship.

Louisiana had taken the path of disenfranchisement and state-mandated racial segregation; Cuba had enacted universal manhood suffrage and had seen the emergence of a transracial conception of the nation. What might explain these differences?

Moving through the cane fields, small farms, and cities of Louisiana and Cuba, Rebecca Scott skillfully observes the people, places, legislation, and leadership that shaped how these societies adjusted to the abolition of slavery. The two distinctive worlds also come together, as Cuban exiles take refuge in New Orleans in the 1880s, and black soldiers from Louisiana garrison small towns in eastern Cuba during the 1899 U.S. military occupation.

Crafting her narrative from the words and deeds of the actors themselves, Scott brings to life the historical drama of race and citizenship in postemancipation societies.

Mimi Sheller's ground-breaking comparative study analyzes the struggle for freedom and democracy in two Caribbean societies in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery. Pairing the revolutionary Republic of Haiti with the British colony of Jamaica, the author shows how peasants in the 19th-century Caribbean developed a radical critique of elite liberalism and constructed an alternative Pan-Caribbean African identity. Comparing two major peasant rebellions and the relation between them, she describes how Haitian and Jamaican survivors of slavery contributed to the making of democracy in the West.

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This collection reasserts the significant work of the writer and intellectual Neville Dawes, whose poetry has been unavailable since the late 1950s. A lifelong Marxist and a lover of English literature, Dawes's concern for the rural Jamaican working class is evident in the poems that celebrate his youth in the village of Sturge Town, Jamaica. Written between 1950 and 1970, these inspiring poems show that the strength provided by heritage can overcome the difficulties posed by the social and political hardships of modern life. An introduction and several poems written by Dawes's son, Kwame Davis, are also included.

The gay cultures of Latin America expressed themselves in a variety of ways artistically, from the early 19th century to the present. "Images of Ambiente" traces the development of such art and reflects the backlash against gay American influences.