Anglophone Caribbean Children’s Literature A Snapshot

Abstract

This chapter reviews the transition in children’s literature after the 1960s from colonialist to postcolonialist content as a framework for understanding contemporary Anglophone Caribbean children’s literature. Local voices integrated folklore into curricular material beginning in the 1930s, with far more expansive output after 1960. Writers offer historical and realistic fiction that countered colonialist paradigms. Waves of immigration to the US, Canada, and Great Britain (with its Caribbean Arts Movement) contributed to the rise of such literature, proliferating into children’s poetry, folklore, and rhyming books that integrating tastes of the region’s linguistic Creole-informed cadences. In the past two decades, festival awards, non-profit organizations, and local publishing houses have fostered the development of young adult literature that now treats problems common to the genre—emerging sexuality, mental health, sports, romance, and issues of identity. Writers address contemporary problems such as poverty, global warming, and political corruption through multiple genres popular among the age group including dystopian fiction, romance, mystery, and new realism, often laced with bits of Caribbean mythology.