The Trinidad Awakening

Sander . . . presents a definitive, thoroughly researched, gracefully expressed study of literary activity in Trinidad in the 1930s, and its literary/cultural implications for West Indian literature in general. . . . In Caribbean literary studies, Sander's work is pioneering in its drawing of successful links between cultural productions and historical realities. The book's organization is clear and logical; its accessibility enhanced by a well-documented index. Choice This is the first comprehensive history of the Trinidadian literature that paved the way for the emergence over the past forty years of many major West Indian literary works. Sander contends that the sporadic nature of literary output in the island before the late 1920s can be explained in part as the consequence of Trinidad's linguistic diversity and its rapidly changing patterns of settlement. Until 1797 Trinidad had been a Spanish colony, with a large proportion of French-speaking inhabitants, and it was not until the end of the nineteenth century that English became more widely spoken. The burst of creative activity in the late 1920s was related to the new ascendancy of English and the fact that the society had begun to resolve itself into well-defined racial, social, and economic groupings.

For the first time the Dutch-speaking regions of the Caribbean and Suriname are brought into fruitful dialogue with another major American literature, that of the anglophone Caribbean. The results are as stimulating as they are unexpected. The editors have coordinated the work of a distinguished international team of specialists. Read separately or as a set of three volumes, the History of Literature in the Caribbean is designed to serve as the primary reference book in this area. The reader can follow the comparative evolution of a literary genre or plot the development of a set of historical problems under the appropriate heading for the English- or Dutch-speaking region. An extensive index to names and dates of authors and significant historical figures completes the volume. The subeditors bring to their respective specialty areas a wealth of Caribbeanist experience. Vera M. Kutzinski is Professor of English, American, and Afro-American Literature at Yale University. Her book Sugar's Secrets: Race and The Erotics of Cuban Nationalism, 1993, treated a crucial subject in the romance of the Caribbean nation. Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger has been very active in Latin American and Caribbean literary criticism for two decades, first at the Free University in Berlin and later at the University of Maryland. The editor of A History of Literature in the Caribbean, A. James Arnold, is Professor of French at the University of Virginia, where he founded the New World Studies graduate program. Over the past twenty years he has been a pioneer in the historical study of the Négritude movement and its successors in the francophone Caribbean.

Sander . . . presents a definitive, thoroughly researched, gracefully expressed study of literary activity in Trinidad in the 1930s, and its literary/cultural implications for West Indian literature in general. . . . In Caribbean literary studies, Sander's work is pioneering in its drawing of successful links between cultural productions and historical realities. The book's organization is clear and logical; its accessibility enhanced by a well-documented index. Choice This is the first comprehensive history of the Trinidadian literature that paved the way for the emergence over the past forty years of many major West Indian literary works. Sander contends that the sporadic nature of literary output in the island before the late 1920s can be explained in part as the consequence of Trinidad's linguistic diversity and its rapidly changing patterns of settlement. Until 1797 Trinidad had been a Spanish colony, with a large proportion of French-speaking inhabitants, and it was not until the end of the nineteenth century that English became more widely spoken. The burst of creative activity in the late 1920s was related to the new ascendancy of English and the fact that the society had begun to resolve itself into well-defined racial, social, and economic groupings.

This is an important document in Caribbean literary history, republished here for the first time since 1943. It includes a new interview with the compiler, A.M. Clarke.

This book tells the story of how intellectuals in the English-speaking Caribbean first created a distinctly Caribbean and national literature. As traditionally told, this story begins in the 1950s with the arrival and triumph of V.S. Naipaul, George Lamming, and their peers in the London literary scene. However, Afro-Caribbeans were writing literature already in the 1840s as part of larger movements for political rights, economic opportunity, and social status. Rosenberg offers a history of this first one hundred years of anglophone Caribbean literature and a critique of Caribbean literary studies that explains its neglect. A historically contextualized study of both canonical and noncanonical writers, this book makes the case that the few well-known Caribbean writers from this earlier period, Claude McKay, Jean Rhys, and C.L.R. James, participated in a larger Caribbean literary movement that directly contributed to the rise of nationalism in the region. This movement reveals the prominence of Indian and other immigrant groups, of feminism, and of homosexuality in the formation of national literatures.

The nation-state of Trinidad and Tobago offers a unique case for the study of the forces and ideologies of nationalism. This book reveals how this ethnically diverse nation (40% African origin, 40-45% East Indian origin, plus those of Syrian, Chinese, Portuguese, French and English descent), independent for less than forty years, has provided fertile ground for the creative tension between the imagination of the writer in his or her search for a habitable text of identity and the official discourse on nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago. This discourse has in turn been embedded in a struggle that propels the nation's story. Following on from this background, the study examines the changes and influences on the sense of nationalism and peoplehood caused by migration and the ethnicization of migrant communities in the metropoles.

Situated opposite the mouth of the Orinoco River, western Trinidad has long been considered an entrepôt to mainland South America. Trinidad's geographic position - seen as strategic by various imperial governments - led to many heterogeneous peoples from across the region and globe settling or being relocated there. The calm waters around the Gulf of Paria on the western fringes of Trinidad induced settlers to construct a harbour, Port of Spain, around which the modern capital has been formed. From its colonial roots into the postcolonial era, western Trinidad therefore has played an especial part in the shaping of the island's literature. Viewed from one perspective, western Trinidad might be deemed as narrating the heart of the modern state's national literature. Alternatively, the political threats posed around San Fernando in Trinidad's southwest in the 1930s and from within the capital in the 1970s present a different picture of western Trinidad - one in which the fractures of Trinidad and Tobago's projected nationalism are prevalent. While sugar remains a dominant narrative in Caribbean literary studies, this book offers a unique literary perspective on matters too often perceived as the sole preserve of sociological, anthropological or geographical studies. The legacy of the oil industry and the development of the suburban commuter belt of East-West Corridor, therefore, form considerable discursive nodes, alongside other key Trinidadian sites, such as Woodford Square, colonial houses and the urban yards of Port of Spain. This study places works by well-known authors such as V. S. Naipaul and Samuel Selvon, alongside writing by Michel Maxwell Philip, Marcella Fanny Wilkins, E. L. Joseph, Earl Lovelace, Ismith Khan, Monique Roffey, Arthur Calder-Marshall, Zenga Longmore and the largely neglected novelist, Yseult Bridges, who is almost entirely forgotten today. Using fiction, calypso, history, memoir, legal accounts, poetry, essays and journalism, this study opens with an analysis of Trinidad's nineteenth century literature and offers twentieth century and more contemporary readings of the island in successive chapters. Chapters are roughly arranged in chronological order around particular sites and topoi, while literature from a variety of authors of British, Caribbean, Irish and Jewish descent is represented.

" ... Documents the history and development of [Post-colonial literatures in English, together with English and American literature] and includes original research relating to the literatures of some 50 countries and territories. In more than 1,600 entries written by more than 600 internationally recognized scholars, it explores the effect of the colonial and post-colonial experience on literatures in English worldwide.