After The Postcolonial Caribbean

'A book of rare beauty' - Bill Schwarz, Professor at Queen Mary University of London Across the Anglophone Caribbean, the great expectations of independence were never met. From Black Power and Jamaican Democratic Socialism to the Grenada Revolution, the radical currents that once animated the region recede into memory. More than half a century later, the likelihood of radical change appears vanishingly small on the horizon. But what were the twists and turns in the postcolonial journey that brought us here? And is there hope yet for the Caribbean to advance towards more just, democratic and empowering futures? After the Postcolonial Caribbean is structured in two parts, 'Remembering', and 'Imagining.' Author Brian Meeks employs a sometimes autobiographical form, drawing on his own memories and experiences of the radical politics and culture of the Caribbean in the decades following the end of colonialism. And he takes inspiration from the likes of Edna Manley, George Lamming and Stuart Hall in reaching towards a new theoretical framework that might help forge new currents of intellectual and political resistance. Meeks concludes by making the case for reestablishing optimism as a necessary cornerstone for any reemergent progressive movement.

Drawing on the long and varied history of discourses of cultural hybridity across the caribbean, this book explores the rich and fraught cultural crossings that are often theorized homogeneously in postcolonial studies as 'hybridity'. What is the relationship of cultural hybridity to social equality? Why have some forms of hybridity been enshrined in the caribbean imagination and others disavowed? What is the appeal of cultural hybridity to nationalist and post-nationalist projects alike? What can we learn from the hybridization of Afro-caribbean and Indo-caribbean cultures set in motion by slavery and indentureship? In answering these questions, this book intervenes in several important debates in postcolonial studies about cultural resistance and popular agency, feminism and cultural nationalism, the relations between postmodernism and postcolonialism, and the status of nationalism in an age of globalization.

Tobias Döring uses Postcolonialism as a backdrop to examine and question the traditional genres of travel writing, nature poetry, adventure tales, autobiography and the epic, assessing their relevance to, and modification by, the Caribbean experience. Caribbean-English Passages opens an innovative and cross-cultural perspective, in which familiar oppositions of colonial/white versus postcolonial/black writing are deconstructed. English identity is thereby questioned by this colonial contact, and Caribbean-English writing radically redraws the map of world literature. This book is essential reading for students of Postcolonial Literature at both undergraduate and postgraduate level.

Caribbean Political Thought: Theories of the Post-Colonial State reckons with the vast body of radical work and thought on the post-colonial Caribbean state. It focuses on the period after the Second World War, when a significant number of Caribbean countries gained their independence, and the character of the region's post-colonial politics had become clear. The survey of political thought in this collection is divided into four sections: theories of the post-colonial state, theorizing post-colonial citizenship, Caribbean regionalism and political culture. Includes contributions from: Walter Rodney Ernesto Sagas Percy Hintzen Michel-Rolph Trouillot Carl Stone Brian Meeks CY Thomas George Danns M. Jacqui Alexander Norman Girvan George Belle Eudine Barriteau Hilbourne Watson Tracy Robinson Obika Gray Patricia Mohammed Charles Mills C.L.R. James Frantz Fanon Stuart Hall Edouard Glissant Archie Singham Eric Williams Rupert Lewis Jack Dahomay George Lamming Erna Brodber Sylvia Wynter Arthur Lewis Patsy Lewis Havelock R.H. Ross-Brewster

In Reclaiming Difference, Carine Mardorossian examines the novels of four women writers--Jean Rhys (Dominica/UK), Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe/USA), Edwidge Danticat (Haiti/USA), and Julia Alvarez (Dominican Republic/USA)--showing how their writing has radically reformulated the meanings of the national, geographical, sexual, and racial concepts through which postcolonial studies has long been configuring difference. Coming from the anglophone, francophone, and hispanophone Caribbean, these writers all stage and identify with transcultural experiences that undermine the usual classification of literary texts in terms of national and regional literatures, and by doing so they challenge the idea that racial and cultural identities function as stable points of reference in our unstable world. Focusing on the transformations that have taken place in postcolonial studies since the field began to focus on theory, Mardorossian highlights not only how these writers make use of the styles of creolization and hybridity that have dominated Caribbean and postcolonial studies in recent years but also how they distinguish themselves from the movement's leading figures by offering new articulations of the ties that link race and nation to gender and class. She illuminates how these writers extend the notion of hybridity away from racial and cultural differences in isolation from each other to a set of crisscrossing categories that challenge our simpler, normative figurations. For scholars in postcolonial studies, Caribbean studies, literary feminist studies, and studies in comparative literature, Reclaiming Difference represents a new phase in postcolonial studies that calls for a fundamental rethinking of the field's terminology and assumptions.

Orlando Patterson returns to Jamaica, his birthplace, to reckon with its history and culture. Locals claim to be some of the world's happiest people, and their successes in music and athletics are legendary. Yet the country remains violent and poor. In Jamaica the dilemmas of globalization and postcolonial politics are thrown into stark relief.

This book is the first major study of French Caribbean literature in light of the concept of postcoloniality. Postcolonial theory debates have developed in the anglophone domain, and have not as yet referred prominently to francophone literature. Jeannie Suk investigates how the literature of Martinique and Guadeloupe provides a kaleidescopic view of the paradoxes at the heart of postcoloniality. Through subtle and provocative readings of Aimé Césaire, Edouard Glissant, Maryse Condé, Baudelaire, Freud, and others, she illuminates how the development of French Caribbean literature and debates about négritude, antillanité, and creolité contribute to theories of in-betweenness and incompleteness central to postcolonial modes. In each chapter, lively and detailed analyses of literary and critical texts reveal connections between key thematic, conceptual, rhetorical, and psychic issues that form the interface of Caribbean and postcolonial concerns. The first part paves theoretical ground, focusing on readings of two seminal texts, Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal and Glissant's Discours antillais; the second part concentrates on Maryse Condé's exemplary work. Lucidly articulating the overlap and interplay of the distance of oceanic crossing, the discontinuities of allegorical signification, and the gap at the heart of trauma, Suk probes the paradoxical dynamic of impossible yet inevitable returns in space, time, and the psyche. She shows how literal and metaphorical "crossings" both produce and impede history and representation. The result is a new framework for understanding the intersection of postcolonial, psychoanalytic, deconstructive, and French Caribbean problems in a language attentive to improbable recurrences across theories and registers. Postcolonial Paradoxes is a major contribution to criticism and theory, of interest to scholars and students of postcolonialism, Caribbean and African diaspora literature, French literature, and psychoanalysis.

The colonization of Latin America and the Caribbean followed the European discovery of the Americas. As the first wave of Western colonialism, the majority of the nations of Latin America had already won their independence from Spain and Portugal before colonialism had fully taken root in other parts of the world. But colonialism lasted longer in the Caribbean and its legacy lingers in Latin America. Special attention is paid to colonial society, which bore little resemblance to the indigenous societies but was a major influence on Latin American societies. An indispensible resource for students of history or Latin America.