Diasporic agency and the power of literary form in Caribbean literature

Abstract

Although Caribbean literature has been considered a diasporic literature for many decades now, it is only over the past 15 years that it has been examined through the diasporic lens. In this essay I suggest that literary form, literary devices, and genres and rhetorics are essential in the constitution of diasporic agency. Diasporic distance is often negotiated through an apparently binary organization of narrative space and time. Citing novels and short stories by Dionne Brand, Myriam Chancy, Edwidge Danticat, Ramabai Espinet, Marie-Elena John and Gisèle Pineau, I will try to show how the apparent duality of the split representation of time and space, the analeptic mode or the epistolary genre is actually more complex than one at first may think. Negotiating diasporic distance and loss, bridging the chasm, and reaching another realm also involves literary form. In the concrete construction of the narratives, multiple avenues towards self-empowerment and agency are explored, both expressing the diasporic reorganization of being.