Caribbean Writers Research Articles

An Overview of Caribbean and African Literary Theories

As it is believed, Africa is the cradle of humankind, where humans also left for other parts of the world during the slave trade and also during World War I and II. At the abolition of the slave trade, many African descendants settled where they could call home, like in the Caribbean islands and other parts of the world, as a result of the ancestral and cultural attachment between Africa and the places where the descendants of the slaves where we could see some similarities in their ways of life. We can see these facts also translate into the African and Caribbean writers' literary works, among other spheres of life. The analyses show that while both literatures share common concerns related to colonial legacy and the quest for identity, they are distinguished by unique historical and socio-political contexts that influence their narrative perspectives. For example, African literature tends to focus more on the effects of colonization and decolonization on the African continent, while Caribbean literature often emphasizes the dynamics of the diaspora and the multiple facets of Caribbean identity. In addition, this study examines the use of language and literary techniques specific to each region, as well as the contributions of major literary figures such as aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Monique Ilboudo, Werewe Liking, Wole Soyinka, Maryse Condé and many others. Finally, this comparison offers a deeper understanding of the richness and diversity of postcolonial literature while highlighting the unique voices and shared experiences of African and Caribbean writers.

Marvelous Returns. Readings of Wifredo Lam by Lydia Cabrera, Alejo Carpentier, and Aimé Césaire

Cuban painter Wifredo Lam (1909-1982) returned to the Caribbean in 1941 after spending eighteen years in Spain and France. In the following four years his painting practice transformed, generating the iconic imagery that he would become known for inventing. His return from Europe figures prominently in essays that Lydia Cabrera, Alejo Carpentier, and Aimé Césaire wrote about him soon after his 1943 completion of La jungla, his most famous painting. These Caribbean writers had close relationships of friendship and collaboration with Lam, and while their essays have become important sources for Lam criticism, they rarely receive critical analysis. In my analysis, I am interested in how they illuminate the role of return in shaping the dichotomy that Alejo Carpentier went on to establish between surrealism and the Americas-located aesthetic he dubbed “lo real maravilloso.” For Carpentier, the aesthetic of the marvelous that the surrealists sought to render emanated readily from social reality in the Americas. I understand this idea to be predicated upon his own return from Europe, and I argue that his earlier work on Lam, alongside Cabrera’s and Césaire’s, offers coordinates for a theory of return, from Europe and surrealism, through which to understand the real-marvelous aesthetic in Lam.

Reception

We have two volumes in Bloomsbury's Classical Receptions in Twentieth-Century Writing series edited by Laura Jansen, namely, Derek Walcott and the Creation of a Classical Caribbean by Justine McConnell, and J. R. R. Tolkien's Utopianism and the Classics by Hamish Williams. Both texts have three main chapters to which is devoted one aspect of the author's reception of the classical world. In the former, McConnell identifies three recurring approaches or processes in Walcott's creation of a ‘classical Caribbean’, often drawing on postcolonial theory. These are: non-linear or non-colonial temporalities (explored under the heading ‘Time’), ‘Syncretism’, and ‘Re-creation’. At the same time, McConnell not only analyses the St. Lucian author's relationship to classical culture and education, but situates his work within that of other Caribbean writers. McConnell paints a cohesive picture of Walcott's (self-)positioning in these entanglements of times, places, and traditions, and makes a number of useful observations about classical reception more broadly.

The Limits of the Postcolonial Theory in the Caribbean Context: “Nearing Forty” as a Case Study

The present paper examines the limits of the postcolonial theory as a critical and historical approach to the Caribbean: its history, its literary and cultural products. To contextualize this examination, the paper starts by comparing the approaches of two contemporary historians to the region’s history, namely, B. W. Higman and Carrie Gibson who traversed and chronicled the region’s checkered past. The comparison aims to isolate the exclusivist-inclusivist dynamics at work in Higman’s linear approach in A Concise History of the Caribbean and Gibson’s episodic approach in Empire’s Crossroads: A History of the Caribbean from Columbus to the Present Day. The paper, then, addresses the analogous manifestations of these dynamics in literary criticism. Concretely, the dynamics are traced in the postcolonial critical approach to Caribbean literature via conducting a close reading of Derek Walcott’s “Nearing Forty” and a critical assessment of John Lennard’s ‘postcolonial’ reading thereof as a case study. The paper concludes with a call for similar reevaluations of the corpora of Caribbean writers and a critical (re)assessment of the attendant postcolonial readings that framed them for long. Being mainly library-based, this paper relies on books, articles, reviews, and interviews.

Standpipes, Chimmeys, and Memorialization in the Caribbean

In this essay I read debates about amenities of water and waste in the British Caribbean in the late and immediate post-Victorian period through histories of intimacy and kinship centered in fiction by Caribbean writers of the last twenty years. In these novels and short stories, collecting water at a stream or a standpipe or emptying a chamber pot are actions that produce or recall moments of desire and aspiration, shame and punishment, in storylines that move between a past of enslavement and indentureship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and a present of political and psychological stasis or upheaval in the 1950s, 1970s, or the early twenty-first century. Nineteenth-century discussions about fire hydrants or standpipes index a British Caribbean colony's evolving landscape of modernization and the disagreements about what shape and speed this process should take, and recent fiction allows us to discern how these amenities inherit and bequeath associations of trauma.

Disturbing the Neighbors

This essay is a response to Belinda Edmondson’s Creole Noise: Early Caribbean Dialect Literature and Performance (2022), which is an excellent history of literary and performative Creole in the anglophone Caribbean, tracing its roots back to the work songs of enslaved African laborers, to the transcriptions and parodies of White Caribbean elites, and to the increasing use in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of Creole by Brown and Black Caribbean writers and performers. Slowly, the language shifted from being a marker of cultural inferiority to a medium for signaling cultural authenticity. Edmondson shows how the everyday language of the anglophone Caribbean haltingly, ambivalently, but in the end decisively elbowed its way into the rooms where print culture was produced, consumed, and evaluated.

Dub Writing in Marcia Douglas’ The Marvellous Equations of the Dread: A Novel in Bass Riddim

Formal experimentation allows writers to critique long-standing notions of tradition and propriety. Within Caribbean literary discourse formal interventions are used to assert Caribbean life, art, and history as its own distinct expression. Particularly in relation to history and origin, or the history of our origins, Caribbean writers have experimented with literary form to articulate the region’s own peculiar understanding of its place within a time/space continuum as outside of conventional structures of knowledge. In this essay, I explore the adaptation of form across creative, artistic genres. Specifically, I look at how writing leverages sound in ways that disturb the belief that writing is a singularly privileged form in which knowledge circulates. Looking at the musical form of Jamaican Dub Music, I consider how the structural features of the sound such as fragmentation, reverb, and echo play out on the pages and in the story of Marcia Douglas’ Marvellous Equations of the Dread: A Novel in Bass Riddim. I argue that Douglas’ novel enacts what I term “dub writing” that draws on the structure of dub music and that the novel suggests how we can imagine new ways to interpret and re/present histories. These new ways—creative interventions—effectively yield versions of history in much the same way that dub music results from the versioning of an orginary text or record. Further, versions are aspirations towards destabilizing the rigid nature of linearity that sustain our conception of time and how it structures history. 

Recuperating the Value of Nothing in Erna Brodber’s Short Novel Nothing’s Mat

In Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere (2011), Raphael Dalleo draws on the concept of the field to note that Caribbean writers often “operate within a constrained set of possibilities governed by certain historically determined rules . . . from accommodation to opposition to more conflicted positions in-between.” Throughout her essays and fiction, the Jamaican writer, sociologist, and activist Erna Brodber recuperates discarded, illegible, or negative elements in the literary field of Caribbean literature. This essay argues that Brodber uses a mode of self-negation in her short novel Nothing’s Mat (2011) to open discursive space for individual and collective identities illegible within dominant theories of Caribbean literature such as pluralism or creolization: supernatural elements more readily identifiable in Latin American magical realism, a Pan-African vision decades after Negritude, and a commitment to the experiences of Afro-Caribbean womanhood.

Caribbean Eco-fictions: Multilayered Stories of the Haitian Environment

Abstract: The duty of care for the nation’s threatened environment, for which the forest and its inhabitants stand as potent symbols, has been at the center of Haitian fiction, as well as of fiction by other Caribbean writers who have set their work in Haiti. The Haitian novel has mourned the impacts of deforestation on both human and nonhuman communities and denounced the practices that have led to catastrophic deforestation and the concomitant biodiversity losses, offering in turn new approaches and potential remedies for addressing one of the nation’s most central problems. The Haitian novel has counseled, above all, political action against extractivist practices and misguided environmental management and conservation measures, portraying the state’s inaction as conducive to the slow violence of environmental neglect. Above all, the Haitian novel has relied on the ecological principles of Vodou, particularly its deep connection to nature, as a foundational source for notions of sustainable development, landscape restoration, and multispecies justice.

Black Irony: Modernism, Mimicry, and African America in Lewis Nkosi’s Drama

ABSTRACT: Like many Black intellectuals that came of age as apartheid was tightening its grip in the 1950s, Lewis Nkosi (1936–2010) left South Africa on a one-way ticket. Although he outlived apartheid and returned to his native land on and off after 1991, he lived abroad in the United States in the 1990s and in Europe in the 2000s. Although allied with the African National Congress in exile, he wrote skeptically about emphatic anti-apartheid writing. His essays from the 1950s on reflect his preference for cosmopolitan and experimental authors from Dostoyevsky to Kafka, in other words for modernism broadly speaking, and his creative writing reflects this preference in the ironic and satirical rather than the usual earnest treatment of the struggle. While several critics have noted this modernist preference, none have examined the influence of Black American authors on Nkosi’s writing. This omission demands attention, as Nkosi’s creative writing, especially drama for stage and radio, draws deeply from Black Americans, even when he steals themes, phrases, and characters without acknowledging sources. The Rhythm of Violence written and performed during his first US sojourn 1960–61, borrows style and phrasing from Black Beat poet Ted Joans, the radio drama “We Can’t All Be Martin Luther King,” broadcast on BBC 4 in 1971, lifts title and tone—unacknowledged—from activist-writer Julian Bond’s ironic poem responding to expectations that all Black intellectuals emulate Dr. King, and The Black Psychiatrist borrows from the decidedly unironic Black nationalist Amiri Baraka. Like Bond and essayist James Baldwin, Nkosi balanced a commitment to struggle—in his case, presenting Black African and Caribbean writers to the BBC and to readers abroad—with an ironic attitude to what he called the absurdity of apartheid and other forms of racism.

Tribute to George Lamming (May 11, 1930 - June 4, 2022)

Tribute to prominant Caribbean writer George Lamming who passed away June 4, 2022 by Cyril Dabydeen.

Making Love (and Maps), Not War

AbstractThe 1918 anti-Chinese riots, which saw scores of Chinese-owned stores destroyed by largely Afro-descended peasant community members, are popularly remembered as one of the worst acts of interracial violence in Jamaica's postemancipation history. However, by examining the coverage of the riots by the Gleaner, Jamaica's newspaper of record, the author embarks on a mapping project to help show the network of nonconforming and anticolonial collaborations within these communities that existed in tandem with interracial tensions. The aim is to show how recapturing these productive collaborations from the past can animate intersectional forms of activism in the present. Furthermore, the article explores how Patricia Powell, as a queer Caribbean writer, uses her novel The Pagoda to perform the same work as the map in creating a counterhistory that gives voice to the anticolonial, nation-building strategies of subaltern groups lost in the gaps of official colonial archives.

V. S. Naipaul, Caribbean Writing, and Caribbean Thought by William Ghosh

V. S. Naipaul, Caribbean Writing, and Caribbean Thought by William Ghosh

Ernest Hemingway and the Faded Fame of Antonio Gattorno

The second instalment in "Hemingway as a Caribbean Writer" examines Hemingway's day-to-day life at the Finca Vigía and his influence on the development of a budding Cuban artist. The final article in this series, Enrique Cirules's "Ernest Hemingway and the Faded Fame of Antonio Gattorno" considers Hemingway's role in the life of a Antonio Gattorno, an artist from Havana who, in part from Hemingway's advice, relocated to the U.S.

Decolonizing American Philosophy

Decolonizing American Philosophy

Plotting the Future in Caribbean SF: Alimentary Imperialism and Horti(counter)culture

This article examines the connection between Caribbean foodways and the varieties of speculative fiction that have emerged from the region. My contention is that Caribbean sf not only draws attention to the baleful impact of capitalist imperialism on agro-ecologies and food cultures, but can also have a special role in catalyzing opposition to it. I examine some of the ways in which Caribbean writers have used sf and, more particularly, Afrofuturist forms to dramatize the bloody history of plantation agriculture, conflicts over land use, and popular resistance to imposed food cultures. Focusing on novels by Anthony Joseph, Erna Brodber, and Diana McCaulay, I explore how their aesthetics of estrangement sensitize readers to the stakes involved in the struggle between food dependency and food sovereignty. Against a backdrop of accelerating climate breakdown, new rounds of imperialist plunder, and the ongoing colonization of eating habits, all three authors draw on the legacy of the plot system to envision emancipatory food futures.

Taking the Blues Away: The Second Edition of The New Negro

Abstract Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation–universally regarded as the key text for what later became known as the Harlem Renaissance–is usually reported as having been published in 1925 and reprinted in 1927. I argue that the 1927 version should in fact be regarded as a second edition, given the significant excision of the two Miguel Covarrubias drawings that had appeared in the original edition as “Jazz.” One of those drawings, given the title “Blues Dancing,” is analyzed closely via its two other appearances, one in W. C. Handy’s Blues: An Anthology (1926), the other in Vanity Fair, illustrating a story by Covarrubias’s friend, the Caribbean writer Eric Walrond. Attention is paid to the setting of the story, the Sugar Cane Club, often viewed as the epitome of jazz cabarets in Harlem. I then address Locke’s decision to omit the Covarrubias drawings from the second edition of The New Negro through consideration of the events of 1926, arguably the pinnacle of the Harlem Renaissance but a year that saw intense debates about the propriety of representations of jazz in Black writing.

Caribbean Writers on Teaching Literature by Lorna Down and Thelma Baker

The publication of this much needed text, “Caribbean Writers on Teaching Literature” edited by Lorna Down and Thelma Baker is to be applauded for two main reasons. Firstly, this text is the “kumbla” which contains the “giants” of Caribbean writing and their experience in delivering the subject. It reveals the other side of lecturers and teachers as the storytellers tell their story in this riveting, honest account of their methodology, successes, and challenges. Secondly, this primary text which speaks to literary pedagogy is indeed unique, engaging, and stimulating.

George Lamming: Reflections on Writing, Politics, and Caribbean Society

Abstract This interview was conducted in September 2014 by the noted African novelist and writer Nuruddin Farah and the Caribbean intellectual historian and scholar Anthony Bogues. George Lamming, a seminal Caribbean novelist, writer, and thinker, is the author of six novels and a remarkable volume of essays, along with several other works. He belongs to a generation of Caribbean writers and intellectuals who carved out a space for Caribbean literature and thought in the twentieth century. In 2014 he was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.

Editor's Note

We open this issue of boundary 2 with two important interviews with Anthony Bogues and George Lamming. Taken together, these documents outline certain important elements of Caribbean literary, intellectual, and political history. They recount the contributions of Caribbean writers and thinkers to global revolutionary and radical politics and aesthetics. Thanks to our colleagues Bogues and Lamming for their reflections and to R. A. Judy and Nuruddin Farah for enabling these moments.