Communities In Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories

This volume examines the representation of community in contemporary anglophone Caribbean literature, focusing on the most recent wave of anglophone Caribbean short story writers following the genre's revival in the mid 1980s. The book takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of community, bringing literary representations of community into dialogue with models of community developed in the field of Caribbean anthropology. Looking in turn at rural, urban, national and global communities, the book draws attention to changing conceptions of community around the turn of the millennium.

This book explores representations of community in Anglophone Caribbean short story collections and cycles of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.

This book examines the representation of community in contemporary Anglophone Caribbean short stories, focusing on the most recent wave of Anglophone Caribbean short story writers following the genre's revival in the mid-1980s. The first extended study of Caribbean short stories, it presents the phenomenon of interconnected stories as a significant feature of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Anglophone Caribbean literary cultures. Lucy Evans contends that the short story collection and cycle, literary forms regarded by genre theorists as necessarily concerned with representations of community, are particularly appropriate and enabling as a vehicle through which to conceptualise Caribbean communities. The book covers short story collections and cycles by Olive Senior, Earl Lovelace, Kwame Dawes, Alecia Mckenzie, Lawrence Scott, Mark McWatt, Robert Antoni and Dionne Brand, and argues that the form of interconnected stories is a crucial part of these writers' imagining of communities, which may be fractured, plural and fraught with tensions, but which nevertheless hold together. The book takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of community, bringing literary representations of community into dialogue with models of community developed in the field of Caribbean anthropology. The works analysed are set in Trinidad, Jamaica and Guyana, and in several cases the setting extends to the Caribbean diaspora in Europe and North America. Looking in turn at rural, urban, national and global communities, the book draws attention to changing conceptions of community around the turn of the millennium.

Since its beginnings 33 years ago, Peepal Tree has published around 45 collections of Caribbean short stories, reinforcing the view that the short story is the Caribbean literary form par excellence. This anthology draws from those collections, plus a few guests, focusing on work written over the past twenty-five years, the majority dealing with the recent post-independence period up to the present. Though quality is the ultimate criteria, this anthology is unrivalled in its range across the Anglophone Caribbean and its diasporas, and representative of Caribbean ethnicities, gender and sexual orientations. Stories offer images of the city from ghettos to gated communities, suburbia, villages, the coastal margins. They display a range of contemporary concerns: social fragmentation, political corruption, sexual politics. They display a range of short story genres from satire, gritty realism, magical realism, fantasy, the gothic, the folkloric, horror, crime, erotica, flash fiction, the speculative... Whilst the stories in the anthology collectively offer an insightful picture of both the contemporary Caribbean and of the current status of the Caribbean short story as a form, the overall editorial aim has been to create a book that gives the reader a rich, varied and rewarding reading experience. The collection includes the work of, amongst others, Opal Palmer Adisa, Christine Barrow, Rhoda Bharath, Jacqueline Bishop, Hazel Campbell, Merle Collins, Cyril Dabydeen, Kwame Dawes, Curdella Forbes, Ifeona Fulani, Keith Jardim, Barbara Jenkins, Meiling Jin, Cherie Jones, Helen Klonaris, Sharon Leach, Alecia McKenzie, Sharon Millar, Anton Nimblett, Geoffrey Philp, Velma Pollard, Jennifer Rahim, Raymond Ramcharitar, Jacob Ross, Leone Ross, Olive Senior, Jan Shinebourne, Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw and N.D. Williams.

This collection explores the history and development of the anglophone short story since the beginning of the nineteenth century.

The Short Story after Apartheid offers the first major study of the anglophone short story in South Africa since apartheid’s end. By focusing on the short story this book complicates models of South African literature dominated by the novel and contributes to a much-needed generic and formalist turn in postcolonial studies. Literary texts are sites of productive struggle between formal and extra-formal concerns, and these brief, fragmentary, elliptical, formally innovative stories offer perspectives that reframe or revise important concerns of post-apartheid literature: the aesthetics of engaged writing, the politics of the past, class and race, the legacies of violence, and the struggle over the land. Through an analysis of key texts from the period by Nadine Gordimer, Ivan Vladislavić, Zoë Wicomb, Phaswane Mpe, and Henrietta Rose-Innes, this book assesses the place of the short story in post-apartheid writing and develops a fuller model of how artworks allow and disallow forms of social thought.

The Caribbean ranks among the earliest and most completely globalized regions in the world. From the first moment Europeans set foot on the islands to the present, products, people, and ideas have made their way back and forth between the region and other parts of the globe with unequal but inexorable force. An inventory of some of these unprecedented multidirectional exchanges, this volume provides a measure of, as well as a model for, new scholarship on globalization in the region. Ten essays by leading scholars in the field of Caribbean studies identify and illuminate important social and cultural aspects of the region as it seeks to maintain its own identity against the unrelenting pressures of globalization. These essays examine cultural phenomena in their creolized forms--from sports and religion to music and drink--as well as the Caribbean manifestations of more universal trends--from racial inequality and feminist activism to indebtedness and economic uncertainty. Throughout, the volume points to the contending forces of homogeneity and differentiation that define globalization and highlights the growing agency of the Caribbean peoples in the modern world. Contributors: Antonio Benitez-Rojo (1931-2004) Alex Dupuy, Wesleyan University Juan Flores, City University of New York Graduate Center Jorge L. Giovannetti, University of Puerto Rico Aline Helg, University of Geneva Franklin W. Knight, The Johns Hopkins University Anthony P. Maingot, Florida International University Teresita Martinez-Vergne, Macalester College Helen McBain, Economic Commission for Latin America & the Caribbean, Trinidad Frances Negron-Muntaner, Columbia University Valentina Peguero, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point Raquel Romberg, Temple University

Difficult Reading offers a new approach to formal experimentation in Caribbean literature. In this insightful study, Jason Marley demonstrates how the aggressive, antagonistic elements common to the mid-twentieth-century Caribbean novel foster emotional responses that spark new forms of communal resistance against colonial power. Marley illustrates how experimental Caribbean writers repeatedly implicate their readers in colonial domination in ways that are intended to unsettle and discomfort. In works such as Denis Williams’s The Third Temptation, Wilson Harris’s The Secret Ladder, and Vera Bell’s overlooked prose poem Ogog, acts of colonial atrocity—such as the eradication of Indigenous populations in Guyana, the construction of the Panama Canal, or the disenfranchisement of Afro-Jamaican communities—become mired in aesthetic obfuscation, forcing the reader to confront and rethink their own relationship to these events. In this way, new literary forms engender new forms of insight and outrage, fostering a newly inspired relation to resistance.