Teaching Anglophone Caribbean Literature

This volume recognizes that the most challenging aspect of introducing students to anglophone Caribbean literature--the sheer variety of intellectual and artistic traditions in Western and non-Western cultures that relate to it--also offers the greatest opportunities to teachers. Courses on anglophone literature in the Caribbean can consider the region's specific histories and contexts even as they explore common issues: the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and colonial education; nationalism; exile and migration; identity and hybridity; class and racial conflict; gender and sexuality; religion and ritual. This volume considers how the availability of materials shapes syllabuses and recommends print, digital, and visual resources for teaching. The essays examine a host of topics, including the following: the development of multiethnic populations in the Caribbean and the role of various creole languages in the literature oral art forms, such as dub poetry and reggae music the influence of anglophone literature in the Caribbean on literary movements outside it, such as the Harlem Renaissance and black British writing Carnival religious rituals and beliefs specific genres such as slave narratives and autobiography film and drama the economics of rum Many essays list resources for further reading, and the volume concludes with a section of additional teaching resources.

Within the profile of anglistik & englischunterricht, this volume on Caribbean literature and culture offers discussions and analyses of those issues and approaches which have emerged as particularly important or, indeed, contentious in literary and cultural scholarship in the field. The Caribbean is presented as not only an eminently rich and complex area of study and research, but also as particularly accessible in educational contexts. Immediately recognizable to students in some of its stereotypical tourist images and because of the global appeal of its cultural products in music and life styles, the Caribbean will draw readers of this volume into entering further into the fascinating, multifaceted experience of its literature, art works and immensely productive, varied and lively world of culture in general. Contributions by scholars experienced in research and teaching the Caribbean range from essays on major genres and themes in Caribbean writing to discussions of language, history, theatre, music, as well as issues of translation, gender and the African rootedness of important aspects of Caribbean culture, this giving a tour d'horizon and stimulating further study and research in students and teachers alike.

Teaching, Reading, and Theorizing Caribbean Texts explores alternative approaches to Caribbean texts from transnational and multilingual perspectives. The authors query what new systems and criteria can be implemented to rethink and remodel our theoretical and pedagogical corpus and alter the lenses through which we study Caribbean texts. Pulling from the Caribbean’s global diaspora, the authors examine writers such as Roxane Gay, Esmeralda Santiago, Wilson Harris, and Gloria Anzaldúa in order to resituate the place of Caribbean texts in the classroom. Each chapter argues for a reunification of Caribbean literature studies—rather than studying this body of text only in terms of a certain aspect of its history or culture, the authors necessitate the importance of analyzing these works from a pan-Caribbean perspective. This collection discusses the ideas of transcending individual disciplines and specialties to create global theories, overcoming pedagogical challenges when bringing Caribbean texts into the classroom, and (re)reading texts with the purpose of discovering new symbols, themes, and meanings.

This Companion is divided into six sections that provide an introduction to and critical history of the field, discussions of key texts and a critical debate on major topics such as the nation, race, gender and migration. In the final section contributors examine the material dissemination of Caribbean literature and point towards the new directions that Caribbean literature and criticism are taking.

This book is the first to analyse how BBC radio presented Anglophone Caribbean literature and in turn aided and influenced the shape of imaginative writing in the region. Glyne A. Griffith examines Caribbean Voices broadcasts to the region over a fifteen-year period and reveals that though the program’s funding was colonial in orientation, the content and form were antithetical to the very colonial enterprise that had brought the program into existence. Part literary history and part literary biography, this study fills a gap in the narrative of the region’s literary history.

A study of the multicultural, multilingual, and Creolized languages that characterize Caribbean discourse, especially as reflected in the language choices that preoccupy creative writers Caribbean Literary Discourse opens the challenging world of language choices and literary experiments characteristic of the multicultural and multilingual Caribbean. In these societies, the language of the master— English in Jamaica and Barbados—overlies the Creole languages of the majority. As literary critics and as creative writers, Barbara Lalla, Jean D’Costa, and Velma Pollard engage historical, linguistic, and literary perspectives to investigate the literature bred by this complex history. They trace the rise of local languages and literatures within the English speaking Caribbean, especially as reflected in the language choices of creative writers. The study engages two problems: first, the historical reality that standard metropolitan English established by British colonialists dominates official economic, cultural, and political affairs in these former colonies, contesting the development of vernacular, Creole, and pidgin dialects even among the region’s indigenous population; and second, the fact that literary discourse developed under such conditions has received scant attention. Caribbean Literary Discourse explores the language choices that preoccupy creative writers in whose work vernacular discourse displays its multiplicity of origins, its elusive boundaries, and its most vexing issues. The authors address the degree to which language choice highlights political loyalties and tensions; the politics of identity, self-representation, and nationalism; the implications of code-switching—the ability to alternate deliberately between different languages, accents, or dialects—for identity in postcolonial society; the rich rhetorical and literary effects enabled by code-switching and the difficulties of acknowledging or teaching those ranges in traditional education systems; the longstanding interplay between oral and scribal culture; and the predominance of intertextuality in postcolonial and diasporic literature.

The Caribbean has traditionally been understood as a region that did not develop a significant ‘native’ literary culture until the postcolonial period. Indeed, most literary histories of the Caribbean begin with the texts associated with the independence movements of the early twentieth century. However, as recent research has shown, although the printing press did not arrive in the Caribbean until 1718, the roots of Caribbean literary history predate its arrival. This collection contributes to this research by filling a significant gap in literary and historical knowledge with the first collection of essays specifically focused on the literatures of the early Caribbean before 1850.

A historiography of Caribbean literary history and criticism, the author explores different critical approaches and textual peepholes to re-examine the way twentieth-century Caribbean literature in English may be read and understood.