Selected essays from the rich and complex collection of Edouard Glissant, one of the most prominent writers and intellectuals of the Caribbean, examine the psychological, sociological, and philosophical implications of cultural dependency.

From cross-dressing pirates to servants and slaves, women have played vital and often surprising roles in the navigation and cultural mapping of Caribbean territory. Yet these experiences rarely surface in the increasing body of critical literature on women s travel writing, which has focused on European or American women traveling to exotic locales as imperial subjects. This stellar collection of essays offers a contestatory discourse that embraces the forms of travelogue, autobiography, and ethnography as vehicles for women s rewriting of "flawed" or incomplete accounts of Caribbean cultures. This study considers writing by Caribbean women, such as the slave narrative of Mary Prince and the autobiography of Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole, and works by women whose travels to the Caribbean had enormous impacts on their own lives, such as Aphra Behn and Zora Neale Hurston. Ranging across cultural, historical, literary, and class dimensions of travel writing, these essays give voice to women writers who have been silenced, ignored, or marginalized.

In this volume, scholars take the debate on Creolisation and its manifestations beyond the discipline of history and into debates on ethnicity, identity, class, the economics and politics of slavery and freedom, language, music, cookery and religion.

A study of the multicultural, multilingual, and Creolized languages that characterize Caribbean discourse, especially as reflected in the language choices that preoccupy creative writers Caribbean Literary Discourse opens the challenging world of language choices and literary experiments characteristic of the multicultural and multilingual Caribbean. In these societies, the language of the master— English in Jamaica and Barbados—overlies the Creole languages of the majority. As literary critics and as creative writers, Barbara Lalla, Jean D’Costa, and Velma Pollard engage historical, linguistic, and literary perspectives to investigate the literature bred by this complex history. They trace the rise of local languages and literatures within the English speaking Caribbean, especially as reflected in the language choices of creative writers. The study engages two problems: first, the historical reality that standard metropolitan English established by British colonialists dominates official economic, cultural, and political affairs in these former colonies, contesting the development of vernacular, Creole, and pidgin dialects even among the region’s indigenous population; and second, the fact that literary discourse developed under such conditions has received scant attention. Caribbean Literary Discourse explores the language choices that preoccupy creative writers in whose work vernacular discourse displays its multiplicity of origins, its elusive boundaries, and its most vexing issues. The authors address the degree to which language choice highlights political loyalties and tensions; the politics of identity, self-representation, and nationalism; the implications of code-switching—the ability to alternate deliberately between different languages, accents, or dialects—for identity in postcolonial society; the rich rhetorical and literary effects enabled by code-switching and the difficulties of acknowledging or teaching those ranges in traditional education systems; the longstanding interplay between oral and scribal culture; and the predominance of intertextuality in postcolonial and diasporic literature.

Dangerous Creole Liaisons examines the neglected corpus of white Creole writers from the French Caribbean and how their discourse has been reappropriated to expose the significant role these men played in the construction of blackness, French nationalism and culture.

Creole languages are characteristically associated with a negative image. How has this prestige been formed? And is it as static as the diglossic situation in many anglo-creolophone societies seems to suggest? This volume examines socio-historical and epistemological factors in the prestige formation of Caribbean English-Lexicon Creoles and subjects their classification as a (socio)linguistic type to scrutiny and critical debate. In its analysis of rich empirical data this study also demonstrates that the uses, functions and negotiations of Creole within particular social and linguistic practices have shifted considerably. Rather than limiting its scope to one "national" speech community, the discussion focusses on changes of the social meaning of Creole in various discursive fields, such as inter generational changes of Creole use in the London Diaspora, diachronic changes of Creole representation in written texts, and diachronic changes of Creole representation in translation. The study employs a discourse analytical approach drawing on linguistic models as well as Foucauldian theory.

In The Haitian Revolution, the Harlem Renaissance, and Caribbean Negritude: Overlapping Discourses of Freedom and Identity, Tammie Jenkins argues that the ideas of freedom and identity cultivated during the Haitian Revolution were reinvigorated in Harlem Renaissance texts and were instrumental in the development of Caribbean Negritude. Jenkins analyzes the precipitating events that contributed to the Haitian Revolution and connects them to Harlem Renaissance publications by Eric D. Walrond and Joel Augustus “J.A.” Rogers. Jenkins traces these movements to Paris where black American expatriates, Harlem Renaissance members, and Francophones from Africa and the Caribbean met once a week at Le Salon Clamart to share their lived experiences with racism, oppression, and disenfranchisement in their home countries. Using these dialogical exchanges, Jenkins investigates how the Haitian Revolution and Harlem Renaissance tenets influence the modernization of Caribbean Negritude's development.

A significant focus of the Nita Barrow Unit of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies has been on the centring of power in Caribbean scholarship on gender. This collection explores the theme of power to expose the disruptions and dangers lurking in Caribbean discourses on gender and love when these are approached from interrogating the currencies of power continuously circulating in their operations. Love and Power: Caribbean Discourses on Gender makes several major contributions. The chapters are vibrant and grounded in the complex realities of the contemporary Caribbean even as they challenge canonical thought. The authors simultaneously critique and create knowledge about the lives of women and men within the Caribbean and its diaspora. They employ a range of analytical frameworks to dissect history, international relations, philosophy, intimate partner violence, feminist thought and activism, mothering, masculinities, diasporic migration, international finance, entrepreneurship, erotica, and desire. The book ruptures the feminist silences around love, lust and living in Caribbean societies and discourses. It problematizes the intersections of love and power, love and the power of the erotic, and gender and the love of power. The volume offers a significant contribution to Caribbean thought by documenting the work of scholars who are creating a multidisciplinary language on relations of gender. Co-published with Institute for Gender and Development Studies: Nita Barrow Unit, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill.

Over several generations villagers of Dominica have been shifting from Patwa, an Afro-French creole, to English, the official language. Despite government efforts at Patwa revitalization and cultural heritage tourism, rural caregivers and teachers prohibit children from speaking Patwa in their presence. Drawing on detailed ethnographic fieldwork and analysis of video-recorded social interaction in naturalistic home, school, village and urban settings, the study explores this paradox and examines the role of children and their social worlds. It offers much-needed insights into the study of language socialization, language shift and Caribbean children’s agency and social lives, contributing to the burgeoning interdisciplinary study of children’s cultures. Further, it demonstrates the critical role played by children in the transmission and transformation of linguistic practices, which ultimately may determine the fate of a language.