Critical Perspectives On Caribbean Literature And Culture

Critical Perspectives on Caribbean Literature and Culture is a collection of a dozen essays by Caribbean scholars living in the Caribbean and around the world. Each of the three sections of the book explores the Caribbean as a diasporic space through the lenses of literary and cultural systems. “Negotiating Borders: Women, Sexuality, and Identity” examines the creolized identities of Caribbean societies, gender roles of women, impact of sexual tourism, and censorship of Latino gays and lesbians. The essayists in this section note that much work still needs to be done in academia to give voice to repressed Caribbean populations. “Creating Spaces of Caribbean Artistic Expression: Multiple Representations” focuses on how music, identity, art, and language depict the diversity of the Caribbean experience. In this section, the essayists examine how the process of creation extends to new cultural expressions. “Deconstructing the Diaspora: Caribbean Writers as Political Activists” takes into account the tension between oppressor and oppressed, a pressing issue for many Caribbean authors, and focuses on the role of writers in reconstructing Caribbean culture, politics, and history. In pursuit of a more comprehensive West Indian view, this publication provides a novel perspective on Caribbean literary, cultural, and historical experience. The essays featured complement each other in their representation of the multiplicitous Caribbean region with all its claims and anxieties. They cover a wide range of writers and diverse cross-cultural encounters within the Caribbean region and reflect on issues such as Caribbean identity, migration, and artistic form of expression. This publication cuts across geographies, cultures, and disciplines, enriching Caribbean scholarship by recognizing the Caribbean’s tradition of resistance and courage.

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.

Critical Perspectives on Conflict in Caribbean Societies of the Late 20th and Early 21st Centuries intervenes to enrich existing scholarship on postcolonial Caribbean literature and art. Using interdisciplinary, cultural studies and Caribbean cultural studies methodologies, in addition to more classical literary readings of works, this book adopts a fresh approach to conflict, bringing a variety of new perspectives to the analysis of conflict dynamics in the Caribbean. Focusing on issues of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, as well as on contemporary representation and analysis of conflict related to other periods in the development of Caribbean societies, this volume provides explorations of conflict in the Caribbean region, in the transnational relationships between this region and North America, and in the transcolonial relationships between the French Caribbean and France. This bi-lingual publication will particularly appeal to scholars and students of Caribbean Literature in English and French, Postcolonial and African Diasporic Literatures and Cultures, Feminist Literary Studies, and Contemporary Art Studies. Critical Perspectives on Conflict in Caribbean Societies of the Late 20th and Early 21st Centuries offers studies of recent fiction and works of art by established and emerging Caribbean writers and artists. In addition, as articles are dedicated to discussions of particular authors, such as Earl Lovelace, Ramabai Espinet, Edwidge Danticat, Raphaël Confiant, Patrick Chamoiseau, Gerty Dambury, and Gisèle Pineau, the range of perspectives found in this volume covers fiction published by male and female writers from both the Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean.

The short story has been integral to the development of Caribbean literature, and continues to offer possibilities for invention and reinvigoration. As the most comprehensive study of its kind, this important and timely volume explores the significance of the short story form to Caribbean cultural production across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The twenty original essays collected here offer a unique set of inquiries and insights into the historical, cultural and stylistic characteristics of Caribbean short story writing. The book draws together diverse critical perspectives from established and emerging scholars, including Shirley Chew, Alison Donnell, James Procter, Raymond Ramcharitar and Elaine Savory. Essays cover the publishing histories of specific islands; intersections of the local, global and diasporic; treatments of race and gender; language, orality and genre; and cultural contexts from tourism to calypso to cricket. Book jacket.

The articles in this collection are representative of the criticism that has followed Walcott's career from the 1940s into the 1990s. Ten entries by Walcott himself (including one not previously published and two vital interviews) are complemented by some 40 incisive essays and reviews, ranging from professional assessments to the rare, personal observations of Walcott's earliest mentors.

Critical Perspectives on David Chariandy explores the fiction written by this Caribbean Canadian writer to bring new perspectives to the existing scholarship on memory, history, trauma, myth, second-generation issues, cultural inheritance and transmission. The works presented in this collection about Chariandy’s novels Soucouyant and Brother consider new aspects and bring a fresh gaze to themes that have previously been explored. Critical Perspectives on David Chariandy presents second-generation Caribbean Canadian cultural affiliation to the Caribbean and North America as an outcome of a self-managed reparatory postcolonial aural transmission. It brings a new exploration of relationships between dementia, animality, forgetting, transformation, and identity, as well as an original analysis of the implications and stakes raised by Canadian middlebrow reception of Soucouyant in 2007. The new readings of Chariandy’s exploration of the relationship between history, memory, and myth, included in this collection, disclose the stakes and scope of the author’s use of the myth of the soucouyant, and of the mythologies of Scarborough and Canada. This collection also approaches Soucouyant as the literary form of a process of searching for healing that operates both at personal and collective levels, demonstrating the author's use of different types of memories for healing power.

"Mothering has been a recurring theme in the work of many women writers and Caribbean women writers are no exception. Furthering this dialogue, Feminist and Critical Perspectives on Caribbean Mothering not only accentuates the varied representations of mothering and motherhood but also challenges traditional interpretations of mothering. Thus, the volume comprises of a collection of essays, which examine the multiple definitions and images of mothering and motherhood--from childbirth as the initial site to surrogate, communal, and extended parenthood in the stories of generations of women that include grandmothers, godmothers, sisters and aunts. Writing out of their numerous cultural, political, social, spiritual, and economic worlds, these Caribbean mothers bring needed attention to their endurance of social class, language, cultural chauvinism, physical and psychological exile, racial politics, and colonial sovereignty barriers." -- Publisher's description.

This groundbreaking study of prolific Trinidadian writer Sam Selvon includes background essays, interviews with Selvon, and critical assessments of his ten novels and collected short stories. An extensive bibliography and notes on the contributors are included. In addition to Sam Selvon, the contributors to the work include Whitney Balliett, Harold Barratt, Edward Baugh, Frank Birbalsingh, E.K. Brathwaite, Edith Efron, Michel Fabre, Anson Gonzalez, Louis James, George Lamming, Bruce F. Macdonald, Peter Nazareth, V.S. Naipaul, Sandra Paquet, Jeremy Poynting, Isabel Quigley, Kenneth Ramchand, Eric Roach, Gordon Rohlehr, Andrew Salkey, Clancy Sigal, Derek Walcott, Edward Wilson, and Francis Wyndham