Introduction: Take Bad Something Make Laugh: The Emergence of Humor in the Caribbean Literary Tradition

Abstract

Increasingly, African diasporic communities in the English-speaking Americas recognize humor’s subversive and creative potential. Still, despite the strategy’s prominence in groundbreaking Caribbean works such as C. L. R. James’ Minty Alley (1936), George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin (1953), Una Marson’s poetry, and Derek Walcott’s bawdy plays, Caribbean literary scholarship has been slower to acknowledge that potential. Patricia Mohammed pinpoints various colonial and African diasporic contexts that necessitated the use of disruptive strategies like humor that had long served Caribbean individuals’ ancestors. As both Mohammed and Henry Louis Gates Jr. indicate, many of the traditional discursive tools not only survived the Middle Passage, but, in fact, dominated diasporic authors’ assertions of selfhood in New World contexts. Specifically, Mohammed alludes to a powerful humor that “transforms cultural values” during revolutionary moments and allows “the unpalatable to be evoked and easily digested.”2 The discussion that follows explores humor’s productive interrogation of relationships within Caribbean communities, particularly between Westerners and non-Westerners.3 Because of a long-standing tendency to combine non-Western and Western practices, this project examines the ways in which humor merges with orality and appropriation, or what I define as “literary crossing,” to introduce formal and ideological African diasporic cultural interventions into appropriated works.