ENGL 358 - Caribbean Literature

A study of the multicultural, multilingual, and Creolized languages that characterize Caribbean discourse, especially as reflected in the language choices that preoccupy creative writers.

From wide-ranging overviews of the entire region to close readings of specific works, this volume opens a fascinating window on the literatures and cultures of the Caribbean, covering texts in the multiplicity of languages used in the wider Caribbean.

The text looks primarily at Negrismo and Négritude, two literary movements that appeared in the Francophone and Hispanic Caribbean as well as in Africa at the beginning of the 20th century. It poses the bases of both movements in the Caribbean and in Africa, and lays out the literary antecedents that influenced or shaped both movements. This book examines the Négritude movement and search for cultural identity through poetry, and further discusses the under-represented Négritude women writers who were silenced by their male counterparts during the first half of the 20th century. Ultimately, this is a book on Caribbean cultural identity that shows it in a slippery and fluctuating zone. By demonstrating that while the founders of the Négritude movement both identified themselves as descendants of Africans and were proud to proclaim their African heritage, the members of the Antillanité and Créolité movements see themselves as a product of miscegenation between different cultures.

This book is a history of Creole, or 'dialect', literature and performance in the English-speaking Caribbean, from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. By emphasizing multiracial origins, transnational influences, and musical performance alongside often violent historical events of the nineteenth century - slavery, Emancipation, the Morant Bay Rebellion, the era of blackface minstrelsy, indentureship and immigration - it revises the common view that literary dialect in the Caribbean was a relatively modern, twentieth-century phenomenon, associated with regional anti-colonial or black-affirming nationalist projects.

The literature of the Caribbean reflects the social, political, and cultural concerns of the region and is a valuable tool for learning about the area and its people. This book includes chapters on roughly a dozen contemporary Caribbean writers. Along with plot summaries, these sections discuss major themes and give close attention to how Caribbean culture figures in the writer's texts. Each chapter provides a brief biography, followed by a critical analysis of one or more significant literary works. These discussions consider the plot and themes of the texts and examine how the literary works reflect Caribbean cultural and social issues.

The Caribbean produced what is arguably the most vigorous and exciting body of poetry of the twentieth century. This text is an anthology of Caribbean poetry available that represents all of the Caribbean -- not only the English language writers. The book features a range of poets, from Derek Walcott and Edward Braithwaite to Jesus Cos Causse, and from Olive Senior to Una Marson. It covers less acclaimed poets of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, as well as exciting newer voices from the 80s and 90s. Poetry lovers of any description will find this a rich and satisfying book.

This book examines the ways Guadeloupean women writers Maryse Condé, Simone Schwarz-Bart and Myriam Warner-Vieyra demystify the theme of the return to Africa as opposed to the masculinist version by Négritude male writers from the 1930s to 1960s. Négritude drew much of its strength from the idea of a mythical or cultural reconnection with the African past allegorized as a mother figure. In contrast these women writers of the post-colonial era who are to large extent heirs of Négritude, differ sharply from their male counterparts in their representation of Africa. In their novels, the continent is not represented as a propitious mother figure but a disappointing father figure. This study argues that these women writers' subversion of the metaphorical figure of Africa and its transformation is tied to their gender. The women novelists are indeed critical of a female allegorization of the land that is reminiscent of a colonial or nationalist project and a simplistic representation of motherhood that does not reflect the complexities of the Diaspora's relation to origins and identity.

This title offers a comprehensive, critically engaging overview of this increasingly significant body of work. The volume is divided into six sections that consider the foremost figures of the Anglophone Caribbean literary tradition and a history of literary critical debate textual turning points, identifying key moments in both literary and critical history and bringing lesser known works into context fresh perspectives on enduring and contentious critical issues including the canon, nation, race, gender, popular culture and migration; new directions for literary criticism and theory, such as eco-criticism, psychoanalysis, and queer studies; the material dissemination of Anglophone Caribbean literature; and generic interfaces with film and visual art.