Making West Indian Literature

Making West Indian Literature
Author: Mervyn Morris
Publisher: Ian Randle Publishers
Total Pages: 145
Release: 2005
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9766371741

"West Indian Literature, as a body of work, is a fairly recent phenomenon; and literary criticism has not always acknowledged the diversity of approaches to writing effectively. In Making West Indian Literature poet and critic Mervyn Morris explores examples of West Indian creativity shaping a range of responses to experience, which often includes colonial traces. Appreciating various kinds of making and a number of West Indian makers, these engaging essays and interviews display a recurrent interest in the processes of composition. Some of the prices highlight writer-performers who have not often been examined. This very readable book, often personal in tone, makes a distinctive contribution to the knowledge and understanding of West Indian Literature. "

Disturbers of the Peace

Disturbers of the Peace
Author: Kelly Baker Josephs
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2013-10-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813935075

Exploring the prevalence of madness in Caribbean texts written in English in the mid-twentieth century, Kelly Baker Josephs focuses on celebrated writers such as Jean Rhys, V. S. Naipaul, and Derek Walcott as well as on understudied writers such as Sylvia Wynter and Erna Brodber. Because mad figures appear frequently in Caribbean literature from French, Spanish, and English traditions—in roles ranging from bit parts to first-person narrators—the author regards madness as a part of the West Indian literary aesthetic. The relatively condensed decolonization of the anglophone islands during the 1960s and 1970s, she argues, makes literature written in English during this time especially rich for an examination of the function of madness in literary critiques of colonialism and in the Caribbean project of nation-making. In drawing connections between madness and literature, gender, and religion, this book speaks not only to the field of Caribbean studies but also to colonial and postcolonial literature in general. The volume closes with a study of twenty-first-century literature of the Caribbean diaspora, demonstrating that Caribbean writers still turn to representations of madness to depict their changing worlds.

An Introduction to West Indian Poetry

An Introduction to West Indian Poetry
Author: Laurence A. Breiner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 1998-09-10
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780521587129

This introduction to West Indian poetry is written for readers making their first approach to the poetry of the Caribbean written in English. It offers a comprehensive literary history from the 1920s to the 1980s, with particular attention to the relationship of West Indian poetry to European, African and American literature. Close readings of individual poems give detailed analysis of social and cultural issues at work in the writing. Laurence Breiner's exposition speaks powerfully about the defining forces in Caribbean culture from colonialism to resistance and decolonization.

Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1970-2020: Volume 3

Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1970-2020: Volume 3
Author: Ronald Cummings
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2021-02-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781108474009

The period from the 1970s to the present day has produced an extraordinarily rich and diverse body of Caribbean writing that has been widely acclaimed. Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1970-2020 traces the region's contemporary writings across the established genres of prose, poetry, fiction and drama into emerging areas of creative non-fiction, memoir and speculative fiction with a particular attention on challenging the narrow canon of Anglophone male writers. It maps shifts and continuities between late twentieth century and early twenty-first century Caribbean literature in terms of innovations in literary form and style, the changing role and place of the writer, and shifts in our understandings of what constitutes the political terrain of the literary and its sites of struggle. Whilst reaching across language divides and multiple diasporas, it shows how contemporary Caribbean Literature has focused its attentions on social complexity and ongoing marginalizations in its continued preoccupations with identity, belonging and freedoms.

Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature

Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature
Author: Alison Donnell
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2007-05-07
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1134505868

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.

Wholeness and Home in West Indian Literature

Wholeness and Home in West Indian Literature
Author: Daizal R. Samad
Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2023-08-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1398463795

WHOLENESS AND HOME IN WEST INDIAN LITERATURE is an invaluable resource for everyone who has an interest in West Indian literature or Culture, West Indian Society or History, Ethnic Tensions, and Psychic Heterogeneity. It is especially useful for university and secondary school students and teachers who teach or need to learn about writers from the West Indies. It offers unique critical insights into the works of globally renowned writers who hail from the Caribbean: V.S. Naipaul, George Lamming, Wilson Harris, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, John Hearn, Jean Rhys, and Derek Walcott. WHOLENESS AND HOME is important reading for any student of ethnic relations. The book focuses on the possibilities of a culture that had its very beginnings in genocide and in the forced or fraudulent fetching of human beings from many other places. These people were pitted against each other to ensure division and assure plantation profitability. This book examines how major West Indian writers capture this initial ethnic antagonism that now infects much of the world. WHOLENESS AND HOME also insists on the futility of racism and bigotry by pointing to the enormous potential for social harmony. At the very least, Samad and Harripersaud offer excellent examples of essay writing for teachers and students, especially those at the university and college levels.

Making Homes in the West/Indies

Making Homes in the West/Indies
Author: Antonia Macdonald-Smythe
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2012-10-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1136544437

This study focuses on the ways in which two of the most prominent Caribbean women writers residing in the United States, Michelle Cliff and Jamaica Kincaid, have made themselves at home within Caribbean poetics, even as their migration to the United States affords them participation and acceptance within its literary space.

Narratives of Obeah in West Indian Literature

Narratives of Obeah in West Indian Literature
Author: Janelle Rodriques
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2019-04-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0429998651

This book explores representations of Obeah – a name used in the English/Creole-speaking Caribbean to describe various African-derived, syncretic Caribbean religious practices – across a range of prose fictions published in the twentieth century by West Indian authors. In the Caribbean and its diasporas, Obeah often manifests in the casting of spells, the administration of baths and potions of various oils, herbs, roots and powders, and sometimes spirit possession, for the purposes of protection, revenge, health and well-being. In most Caribbean territories, the practice – and practices that may resemble it – remains illegal. Narratives of Obeah in West Indian Literature analyses fiction that employs Obeah as a marker of the Black ‘folk’ aesthetics that are now constitutive of West Indian literary and cultural production, either in resistance to colonial ideology or in service of the same. These texts foreground Obeah as a social and cultural logic both integral to and troublesome within the creation of such a thing as ‘West Indian’ literature and culture, at once a product of and a foil to Caribbean plantation societies. This book explores the presentation of Obeah as an ‘unruly’ narrative subject, one that not only subverts but signifies a lasting ‘Afro-folk’ sensibility within colonial and ‘postcolonial’ writing of the West Indies. Narratives of Obeah in West Indian Literature will be of interest to scholars and students of Caribbean Literature, Diaspora Studies, and African and Caribbean religious studies; it will also contribute to dialogues of spirituality in the wider Black Atlantic.

Writing in Limbo

Writing in Limbo
Author: Simon Gikandi
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2018-03-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 150172293X

In Simon Gikandi’s view, Caribbean literature and postcolonial literature more generally negotiate an uneasy relationship with the concepts of modernism and modernity—a relationship in which the Caribbean writer, unable to escape a history encoded by Europe, accepts the challenge of rewriting it. Drawing on contemporary deconstructionist theory, Gikandi looks at how such Caribbean writers as George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, Alejo Carpentier, C. L. R. James, Paule Marshall, Merle Hodge, Zee Edgell, and Michelle Cliff have attempted to confront European modernism.