This book focuses on Derek Walcott’s literary and artistic wor(l)d. Western postcolonial critique has depicted the Nobel Prize laureate as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century world. This, however, devalues his fundamental contribution to the realm of Caribbean theatre and art. The text examines Walcott’s multimodal production, a combination of West Indian folkloric forms and Western-oriented structures and themes, by discussing three of his works—two plays, The Joker of Seville and Pantomime, and a long poem, Tiepolo’s Hound. These epitomise respectively a response to Spanish, English, and French cultural legacies in the New World as postcolonial re-writings of Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe, and Camille Pissarro’s stories. Following Quijano and Mignolo’s decolonial approaches and Riane Eisler’s partnership perspective, the book uncovers the strategies used by Walcott to respond to the colonial matrix of power.

A collection spanning the range of the writer's career includes his first published poem, his celebrated verses on violence in Africa, his mature work from "The Star-Apple Kingdom, " and his late masterpieces from "White Egrets."

With chapters written by more than 25 leading and emerging international scholars, The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath provides the most comprehensive collection of contemporary scholarship on Plath's work. Including new scholarly perspectives from feminist and gender studies, critical race studies, medical humanities and disability studies, this collection explores: · Plath's literary contexts – from the Classics and the long poem to W.B Yeats, Edith Sitwell, Ruth Sillitoe, Carol Ann Duffy, and Ted Hughes · New insights from Plath's previously unpublished letters and writings · Plath's broadcasting work for the BBC Providing new approaches to her life and work, this book is an indispensable volume for scholars of Sylvia Plath.

'Theatre as Alter/“Native” in Derek Walcott' attempts a close and detailed politico-aesthetic analysis of his major plays. At the core of this book lies the attempt to answer the question of how postcolonial artists and intellectuals have dared to imagine radically different ways of living in the face of oppositional, binary choices. And as the title suggests, Walcott’s plays carve out critical spaces for new narratives of “becoming” and alternative priorities, entangled in contesting identities inscribed by race, language and ethnicity. Theatre, as Walcott knew, would be instrumental in demystifying Caribbean “Absence” and “Void” and generating an alternative version of dominant reality. By a deliberate unseating of the Western texts, filled with banal stereotypes and their representational biases, and by triggering “re-action” to the scripts of the colonizers in profoundly paradoxical ways, Walcott’s plays affirm the Caribbean identity. This study seeks to demonstrate how his plays open an alter/“native” universe in terms of aesthetics, dramaturgy and the performative, and reclaims ‘New World’ identity in terms of negotiation rather than negation—undermining the claim of “solid”, “authentic” culture. Placing the arts at the forefront of nation-building, Walcott situated his plays at a crucial juncture between the passing of the Empire and the newly-born Federation in his archipelago.

Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays presents a defense of universalism as the foundation of moral and political arguments and commitments. Consisting of five intertwined essays, the book claims that centering such arguments and commitments on a particular place, in this instance the African world, is entirely compatible with that foundational universalism. Ato Sekyi-Otu thus proposes a less conventional mode of Africacentrism, one that rejects the usual hostility to universalism as an imperialist Eurocentric hoax. Sekyi-Otu argues that universalism is an inescapable presupposition of ethical judgment in general and critique in particular, and that it is especially indispensable for radical criticism of conditions of existence in postcolonial society and for vindicating visions of social regeneration. The constituent chapters of the book are exhibits of that argument and question some fashionable conceptual oppositions and value apartheids. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in the fields of social and political philosophy, contemporary political theory, postcolonial studies, African philosophy and social thought.

Can transnationalism be separated from capitalist globalization? Can an artist create cultural space and rethink the nation state simultaneously? In Imaginary States, Peter Hitchcock explores such questions to invigorate the analysis of cultural transnationalism. Juxtaposing the macroeconomic realities of commodities with the creation of cultural workers, Hitchcock offers case studies of Nike and the coffee industry alongside examinations of writings by the Algerian feminist Assia Djebar and the Caribbean writers Edward Glissant, Kamau Brathwaite, and Maryse Conde. The stark contrast of literary examples of cultural transnationalism with discussions of commodity circulation attempts to complicate the relationship between the aesthetic and the economic. Blocking our imagination, Hitchcock argues, is the desire to produce cultural diversity under the terms of a global economy. In believing that to have one we must pursue the other, we flatten difference, erase complexity, and fail to grasp the imaginaries at stake. Hitchcock's invocation of the imagination allows for a deeper understanding of transnational "states"--whether states of being, economic states, or nation states. Proffering that the crisis of globalization is a crisis of the imagination, he urges that cultural transnationalism not be feared or suppressed but approached as a way to imagine difference globally.

The intertwined stories of two archipelagos and their diasporas This volume is the first systematic comparative study of Cuba and Puerto Rico from both a historical and contemporary perspective. In these essays, contributors highlight the interconnectedness of the two archipelagos in social categories such as nation, race, class, and gender to encourage a more nuanced and multifaceted study of the relationships between the islands and their diasporas. Topics range from historical and anthropological perspectives on Cuba and Puerto Rico before and during the Cold War to cultural and sociological studies of diasporic communities in the United States. The volume features analyses of political coalitions, the formation of interisland sororities, and environmental issues. Along with sharing a similar early history, Cuba and Puerto Rico have closely intertwined cultures, including their linguistic, literary, food, musical, and religious practices. Contributors also discuss literature by Cuban and Puerto Rican authors by examining the aesthetics of literary techniques and discourses, the representation of psychological space on the stage, and the impacts of migration. Showing how the trajectories of both archipelagos have been linked together for centuries and how they have diverged recently, Cuba and Puerto Rico offers a transdisciplinary approach to the study of this intricate relationship and the formation of diasporic communities and continuities. Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The Jamaican writer and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter is best known for her diverse writings that pull together insights from theories in history, literature, science, and black studies, to explore race, the legacy of colonialism, and representations of humanness. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis is a critical genealogy of Wynter’s work, highlighting her insights on how race, location, and time together inform what it means to be human. The contributors explore Wynter’s stunning reconceptualization of the human in relation to concepts of blackness, modernity, urban space, the Caribbean, science studies, migratory politics, and the interconnectedness of creative and theoretical resistances. The collection includes an extensive conversation between Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick that delineates Wynter’s engagement with writers such as Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. DuBois, and Aimé Césaire, among others; the interview also reveals the ever-extending range and power of Wynter’s intellectual project, and elucidates her attempts to rehistoricize humanness as praxis.

The period from the 1970s to the present day has produced an extraordinarily rich and diverse body of Caribbean writing that has been widely acclaimed. Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1970-2020 traces the region's contemporary writings across the established genres of prose, poetry, fiction and drama into emerging areas of creative non-fiction, memoir and speculative fiction with a particular attention on challenging the narrow canon of Anglophone male writers. It maps shifts and continuities between late twentieth century and early twenty-first century Caribbean literature in terms of innovations in literary form and style, the changing role and place of the writer, and shifts in our understandings of what constitutes the political terrain of the literary and its sites of struggle. Whilst reaching across language divides and multiple diasporas, it shows how contemporary Caribbean Literature has focused its attentions on social complexity and ongoing marginalizations in its continued preoccupations with identity, belonging and freedoms.