"There is in this work nearly total grasp of the central concerns of . . . Anglophone Caribbean literature. Few books on the subject cover it with the breadth and depth that this has."--Isidore Okpewho, State university of New York, Binghamton "An impressive range of explorations into the ways in which the better-known male Caribbean writers of fiction, poetry, and drama reconceptualize Caribbean history."--Kathleen M. Balutansky, Saint Michael's College Nana Wilson-Tagoe argues that it is in the imaginative recasting of the past, more than in one-dimensional explanations of historical processes, that we find insights in Caribbean history and that it is this recasting that has shaped Caribbean literature in the 20th century. Looking at major Anglophone Caribbean writers in three genres--novels, short stories, and poetry--she analyzes the ways in which history has been perceived, constructed, and used in West Indian literature. In that context she explores the interplay of reality and the fantastic; history and the imagination; myth and ancestral memory; time-bound conceptions of the West Indies and the timeless values of life there. While discussion focuses on the interface between literature and historiography, it also addresses issues in sociology, political science, and philosophy. Wilson-Tagoe's work will appeal to students of Caribbean literature but also and particularly to scholars who study the black Atlantic world, both on its own terms and in its relations with Western society and Africa. Nana Wilson-Tagoe teaches African and Caribbean literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She has published A Reader's Guide to West Indian and Black British Literature as well as articles in Caribbean Review, Trinidad Review, Wasafiri, and Comparative and General Literature.

An academic critical history and survey of West Indian literature in English.

"West Indian Literature, as a body of work, is a fairly recent phenomenon; and literary criticism has not always acknowledged the diversity of approaches to writing effectively. In Making West Indian Literature poet and critic Mervyn Morris explores examples of West Indian creativity shaping a range of responses to experience, which often includes colonial traces. Appreciating various kinds of making and a number of West Indian makers, these engaging essays and interviews display a recurrent interest in the processes of composition. Some of the prices highlight writer-performers who have not often been examined. This very readable book, often personal in tone, makes a distinctive contribution to the knowledge and understanding of West Indian Literature. "

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. The first comprehensive discussion of the major Caribbean thinkers who came to Britain. Written in an accessible, lively style, with a range of wonderful and distinguished authors. Key book for thinking about the future of multicultural Britain; study thus far has concentrated on Caribbean literature and how authors ‘write back’ to Britain – this book is the first to consider how they ‘think back’ to Britain. A book of the moment - nothing comparable on the Carribean influence on Britain.. Discusses the influence, amongst others, of C. L. R. James, Una Marson, George Lamming, Jean Rhys, Claude McKay and V. S. Naipaul.

This book offers a history of post-Independence Trinidad and Tobago. It explores how culture and politics have operated in tandem to shape the society. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including literature, government reports, official statistics, the press and the Carnival, it critically analyses the popular conception of creolization as the driving force in modern Trinidad and Tobago. Ultimately, the book examines the way in which Trinidad and Tobago's unique ethnic and political ecosystems contribute to its national character.

Classical Memories is an intervention into the field of adaptation studies, taking the example of classical reception to show that adaptation is a process that can be driven by and produce intertextual memories. I see ‘classical memories’ as a memory-driven type of adaptation that draws on and reproduces schematic and otherwise de-contextualised conceptions of antiquity and its cultural ‘exports’ in, broadly speaking, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These memory-driven adaptations differ, often in significant ways, from more traditional adaptations that seek to either continue or deconstruct a long-running tradition that can be traced back to antiquity as well as its canonical points of reception in later ages. When investigating such a popular and widespread set of narratives, characters, and images like those that remain of Graeco-Roman antiquity, terms like ‘adaptation’ and ‘reception’ could and should be nuanced further to allow us to understand the complex interactions between modern works and classical antiquity in more detail, particularly when it pertains to postcolonial or post-digital classical reception. In Classical Memories, I propose that understanding certain types of adaptations as intertextual memories allows us to do just that.

The theoretical innovations of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, James Clifford and others have in recent years vitalized postcolonial and diaspora studies, challenging ways in which we understand ‘culture’ and developing new ways of thinking beyond the confines of the nation state. The articles in this volume look at recent developments in diasporic literature and theory, alluding to the work of seminal diaspora theoreticians, but also interrogating such thinkers in the light of recent cultural production (including literature, film and visual art) as well as recent world events. The articles are organized in pairs, offering alternative perspectives on crucial aspects of diaspora theory today: Celebration or Melancholy?; Gender Biases and the Canon of Diasporic Literature; Diasporas of Violence and Terror; Time, Place and Diasporic “Home”; and Border Crossings. A number of the articles are illustrated by discussions of particular authors, such as Caryl Phillips, Salman Rushdie, and Michael Ondaatje, and the range of reference found in this volume covers writing from many parts of the world including contemporary Chicana visual art, Asian diaspora writers, and Black British, Afro-Caribbean, Native North American, and African writing.

Beyond the Blood, the Beach and the Banana emphasises the significance of the Caribbean in an increasingly globalised social world and draws attention to the contribution that scholarship in Caribbean Studies makes in coming to terms with a multi-cultural heritage. The compilation deliberately ranges in focus across periods, geographies, linguistic divisions and subject matter to present the fruition of significant research projects by 25 researchers from the Caribbean, North America and Europe. Contributors on the Hispanic, Dutch, African, Indian and Anglophone Caribbean juxtaposed with work on the Caribbean diasporas of the USA, UK, Canada and the Netherlands enrich the text with multiple perspectives.

This book is the first collection on Indo-Caribbean women's writing and the first work to offer a sustained analysis of the literature from a range of theoretical and critical perspectives, such as ecocriticism, feminist, queer, post-colonial and Caribbean cultural theories. The essays not only lay the framework of an emerging and growing field, but also critically situate internationally acclaimed writers such as Shani Mootoo, Lakshmi Persaud and Ramabai Espinet within this emerging tradition. Indo-Caribbean women writers provide a fresh new perspective in Caribbean literature, be it in their unique representations of plantation history, anti-colonial movements, diasporic identities, feminisms, ethnicity and race, or contemporary Caribbean societies and culture. The book offers a theoretical reading of the poetics, politics and cultural traditions that inform Indo-Caribbean women's writing, arguing that while women writers work with and through postcolonial and Caribbean cultural theories, they also respond to a distinctive set of influences and realities specific to their positioning within the Indo-Caribbean community and the wider national, regional and global imaginary. Contributors visit the overlap between national and transnational engagements in Indo-Caribbean women's literature, considering the writers' response to local or nationally specific contexts, and the writers' response to the diasporic and transnational modalities of Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean communities.

This Pivot examines a body of contemporary neo-Victorian novels whose uneasy relationship with the past can be theorised in terms of aggressive eating, including cannibalism. Not only is the imagery of eating repeatedly used by critics to comprehend neo-Victorian literature, the theme of cannibalism itself also appears overtly or implicitly in a number of the novels and their Victorian prototypes, thereby mirroring the cannibalistic relationship between the contemporary and the Victorian. Tammy Lai-Ming Ho argues that aggressive eating or cannibalism can be seen as a pathological and defining characteristic of neo-Victorian fiction, demonstrating how cannibalism provides a framework for understanding the genre’s origin, its conflicted, ambivalent and violent relationship with its Victorian predecessors and the grotesque and gothic effects that it generates in its fiction.