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The first book to critically redefine and reexamine West Indian literature of the 1950s, Beyond Windrush challenges the myth that an elite cohort of male novelists based in postwar London single-handedly produced Anglophone Caribbean literature and broadens our understanding of Caribbean and Black British literary history. Writers of this cohort, often reduced to George Lamming, V.S. Naipaul, and Sam Sevlon, are referred to “the Windrush writers,” in tribute to the S.S. Empire Windrush, whose 1948 voyage from Jamaica inaugurated the large-scale Caribbean migration to London. They have been properly celebrated for producing a complex, anti-colonial, nationalist literary tradition, but, as this collection demonstrates, their uncritical canonization has obscured the diversity of postwar Caribbean writers and produced a narrow definition of West Indian literature. The fourteen original essays in this collection here make clear that already in the 1950s a wide spectrum of West Indian men and women—Afro-Caribbean, Indo-Caribbean and white-creole—were writing, publishing (and even painting)—and that many were in the Caribbean, Canada, and the United States, rather than London. Moreover, they addressed subjects omitted from the masculinist canon, such as queer sexuality and the environment. The collection offers new readings of canonical authors (Lamming, Roger Mais, and Andrew Salkey); hitherto marginalized authors (such as Ismith Khan, Elma Napier, and John Hearne); commonly ignored genres (such as the memoir, short stories, and journalism); as well as alternative units of cultural and political unity, such as the Pan-Caribbean as well as potentially trans-hemispheric, trans-island conceptions of political identity.

This book offers a comparative analysis of fiction from across the pan-Caribbean, exploring the relationship between literary form, cultural practice, and the nation-state. Engaging with the historical and political impact of capitalist imperialism, decolonization, class struggle, ethnic conflict, and gender relations, it considers the ways in which Caribbean authors have sought to rethink and re-narrate the traumatic past and often problematic “postcolonial” present of the region’s peoples. The book pays particular attention to the role cultural practices such as stickfighting and Carnival, as well as religious rituals and beliefs like Vodou and Myal, have played in efforts to reshape the novel form. In so doing, it provides an original perspective on the importance of these practices, with their emphasis on bodily movement, to the development of new philosophies of history. Beginning in the post-WWII period, when optimism surrounding the possibility of social and political change was at a peak, the book interrogates the trajectories of various national projects through to the present. It explores how the textual histories of common motifs in Caribbean writing have functioned to encode the fluctuating fortunes of different political dispensations. The scope of the analysis is varied and comprehensive, covering both critically acclaimed and lesser-known authors from the Anglophone, Francophone, and Hispanophone traditions. These include Jacques Roumain, Sam Selvon, Marie Chauvet, Luis Rafael Sánchez, Earl Lovelace, Patrick Chamoiseau, Erna Brodber, Wilson Harris, Shani Mootoo, Oonya Kempadoo, Ernest Moutoussamy, and Pedro Juan Gutiérrez.

Connecting Histories: Francophone Caribbean Writers Interrogating Their Past explores the complex interchange between shared and personal pasts and how they impact upon individual lives. Through their historically-informed self-writings, the five Caribbean authors that have been selected for this study–Maryse Condé, Gisèle Pineau, Patrick Chamoiseau, Edwidge Danticat and Dany Laferrière–offer compelling insights into confronting, coming to terms with and reconciling with their past, both collective and individual. A central question is the conceptual link between singular and plural, between personal and collective notions of history and the connections that exist between them. The employment of ‘personal narratives’ as the vehicle to carry out this investigation encompasses the tension that is evident in the writers’ reflections, which constantly move between the collective and the personal and is embodied in the idea of ‘their past’–a complex, rhizomatic network that extends beyond the notion of a single, private life. The contrasting yet complementary nature of the book’s title–connecting histories and the personal past-underlines the existence of a shared past of which the five writers are deeply conscious, but also their own past, which overlaps with these historical inheritances. The book’s central focus, then, is trifold: it concerns a collective, and to some extent documented and shared, historical past; a more variable, unique, personal past revealed in the ‘personal narratives’ of the five authors as well as on the connections between these two pasts.

Global migration is more pronounced than it has ever been while issues concerning immigration are constantly in the news. Yet answers as to why remain few and far between. Conscripts of Migration: Neoliberal Globalization, Nationalism, and theLiterature of New African Diasporas intersects black Atlantic, postcolonial, and queer diaspora studies to answer these increasingly crucial questions regarding crises of immigration by rethinking migration historically and globally. From histories of racial capitalism, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and imperialism to contemporary neoliberal globalization and the resurgence of xenophobic nationalism, countries in the Global North continue to devastate and destabilize the global South. Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, in different ways, police the effects of their own global policies at their borders. This book uses the term conscription as a way to understand the political and economic systems that undergird contemporary immigration and its colonial histories while providing the first substantial study of a new body of contemporary African diasporic literature: migritude. Authors like FatouDiome, Shailja Patel, Nadifa Mohamed, Diriye Osman and others, address vital issues of migrancy, diaspora, global refugee crises, racism against immigrants, identity, gender, sexuality, resurgent nationalisms, and neoliberal globalization.

Juan Francisco Manzano and Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (also known as Plácido) were perhaps the most important and innovative Cuban writers of African descent during the Spanish colonial era.Both nineteenth-century authors used Catholicism as a symbolic language for African-inspired spirituality.Likewise, Plácido and Manzano subverted the popular imagery of Neoclassicism and Romanticism in order to envision black freedom in the tradition of the Haitian Revolution.African religious knowledge subverted official Catholic dogma about redemptive suffering that might free the soul but leave the body enchained.Rather, Plácido and Manzano envisioned emancipation through the lens of African spirituality, which constituted a transformative moment in the history of Cuban letters. Matthew Pettway examines how the portrayal of African ideas of spirit and cosmos in otherwise conventional texts recur throughout early Cuban literature and became the basis for Manzano and Plácido’s antislavery philosophy.Cuban debates about freedom and selfhood were never the exclusive domain of the white Creole elite.Pettway’s emphasis on African-inspired spirituality as a source of knowledge and a means to sacred authority for black Cuban writers deepens our understanding of Manzano and Plácido not as mere imitators but as aesthetic and political pioneers.

Velma Pollard and Erna Brodber, two sister-writers born and raised in Jamaica, recreate imagined and lived homelands in their literature by commemorating the history, culture, and religion of the Caribbean. Velma Pollard was born in St. Catherine, Jamaica; by the time Velma Pollard was three, her parents had moved to Woodside, St. Mary, in northeast Jamaica, where her sister, Erna Brodber was born. They write about their homeland in a series of memories and stories of that lived and imagined experience in their many works: fictional, nonfictional, and poetic. They center on their home village, but occasionally move the settings of their writings to other regions of Jamaica and various Caribbean islands, as well as to other parts of the African diaspora in the United States, Canada, and England. The role of women in the patriarchal society of Jamaica and much of the Caribbean is also a subject of the sisters’ writing. Growing up in what Erna Brodber calls the kumbla, the protective but restrictive environment of many women in the Anglo-Caribbean, is also an important theme in their works. In her fiction, Velma Pollard discusses the gender gaps in employment and the demands of marriage and the special contributions of women to family and community. This study examines Erna Brodber’s work on a par with her sister Velma Pollard’s writing and is the first to do so, drawing upon original interviews.

This book examines the career, oeuvre, and literary theories of one of the most important Caribbean writers living today. Patrick Chamoiseau’s work sheds light on the dynamic processes of creolization that have shaped Caribbean history and culture. Chamoiseau is the recipient of numerous literary prizes, including the prestigious Prix Goncourt for the epic novel Texaco. His diverse body of work, which includes plays, novels, fictionalized memoirs, treatises, and other genres of writing, offers a compelling vision of the postcolonial world from a francophone Caribbean perspective. This book is for scholars interested in francophone, Caribbean, and world literatures as well as cultural studies, and scholars and students with interests in creolization, neocolonialism, and globalization will find it particularly valuable. It brings Chamoiseau’s major works of fiction into dialogue with lesser-known texts, including unpublished theatrical works, screenplays, visual texts, and treatises. This holistic, comprehensive, and largely chronological study of Chamoiseau’s oeuvre includes analyses of various authorial strategies, especially the use of narrative masques, cross-cultural storytelling techniques, and creolizing poetics.

Resisting Paradise asserts the importance of both tourism and diaspora in shaping Caribbean cultural and sexual identity. It examines Caribbean cultural producers who contend with the region’s overdependence on the tourist industry and address the many ways that tourism continues the legacy of colonialism. The book explores the relationship between culture and sex within the production of paradise and investigates the ways in which Caribbean writers, artists, activists, and other cultural producers respond to and powerfully resist this production. Forms of resistance include critiquing exploitation, challenging dominant narratives of history, exposing tourism’s influence on cultural and sexual identity in the Caribbean and its diaspora, and offering alternative models of tourism and travel. Resisting Paradise offers an intriguing emphasis on Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora subjects as travelers and as cultural workers contributing to alternative and resistant understandings of tourism in the Caribbean. Through a unique multi-disciplinary approach to comparative literary analysis, interview material, and participant observation, Angelique V. Nixon analyzes the ways Caribbean cultural producers are taking control of representation and sustaining subjectivity. While focused mainly on the Anglophone Caribbean, the study covers a range of geographical territories including Antigua, The Bahamas, Grenada, Haiti, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago. Overall, the book utilizes a transnational feminist postcolonial framework in order to theorize “resisting paradise” and the sexual-cultural politics of tourism. This research posits an intervention within tourism and diaspora studies by making gender and sexuality the center of inquiry and analysis.

Through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, American youth culture and literature grew up with Puerto Rico. The contemporary US tradition of youth literature and media, along with how young people, as authors, narrate their part in social struggle, is inseparable from Puerto Rican thought and writing. Youth literature, media, and youth-led movements have played a prominent role in portraying the political and cultural relationship between the US and Puerto Rico—from the US acquisition to Puerto Rican writer’s pleas for a place in US letters and culture. During the early colonial encounter, children’s books were among the first kinds of literature produced by US writers introducing the new colony, its people, and the US’s role as a twentieth-century colonial power to the American public. Subsequently, youth literature and media was an important tool of Puerto Rican cultural and educational elite institutions and Puerto Rican revolutionary thought for negotiating US assimilation and upholding a strong Latin American, Caribbean national stance.

Caribbean women have long utilized the medium of fiction to break the pervasive silence surrounding abuse and exploitation. Contemporary works by authors such as Tiphanie Yanique and Nicole Dennis-Benn illustrate the deep-rooted consequences of trauma based on gender, sexuality, and race, and trace the steps that women take to find safer ground from oppression. Taking Flight takes a closer look at the immigrant experience in contemporary Caribbean women’s writing and considers the effects of restrictive social mores. In the texts examined in Taking Flight, culturally sanctioned violence impacts the ability of female characters to be at home in their bodies or in the spaces they inhabit. The works draw attention to the historic racialization and sexualization of Black women’s bodies and continue the legacy of narrating Black women’s long-standing contestation of systems of oppression. Arguing that there is a clear link between trauma, shame, and migration, with trauma serving as a precursor to the protagonists’ emigration, the work focuses on how female bodies are policed, how moral, racial, and sexual codes are linked, and how the enforcement of social norms can function as a form of trauma. Taking Flight positions flight as a powerful counter to disempowerment and considers how flight, whether through dissociation or migration, operates as a form of resistance.