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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.

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.