West Indian Literature Research Articles

Marlon James and the Metafiction of the New Black Gothic

Abstract A reprint from a 2018 issue of the Journal of West Indian Literature devoted to Marlon James, this essay engages two of the West Indian writer's novels, John Crow's Devil and The Book of Night Women, under the rubric of the Gothic. By shifting focus from the violence of James's novels to the generic elements this violence engages, the essay argues that James's engagement with the Gothic better accounts for these two novels’ attention to issues of excessive violence, doubling, and feminine abjection and the way they perform a metafictional critique of the notion that nationalism can produce equitable sovereign subjectivity. While the Gothic offers James's interest in coercion, abjection, and the absence of choice a precise frame for rendering a world structured by neoliberalism, James also reworks the Gothic by offering a queerly affirmative version of its at times misogynistic interest in gender distinctions. Indeed, by ending all his novels with women as the figurative last person standing, James subverts the notion of the feminine abject as the Gothic trope associated with primordial chaos, presenting it instead as a possible way forward at a moment when the historical present is not seemingly graspable by existing paradigms.

The Alfred H. Mendes – Malcolm Lowry Connection

A brief friendship kindled in 1930s New York between the Trinidadian novelist and short-story writer of Portuguese Creole ancestry, Alfred Hubert Mendes (1897–1991) and the late modernist English author, Malcolm Lowry (1909–57), which forged a personal and literary camaraderie, revealing significant rapport reflected in the intersection of their lives. Certain important, mutually enabling parallels between their experiences, political affinities, and literary influences can assist us in making better sense of their relationship. Though Mendes was shaped by adventures in Britain and the United States, his writings were rooted in the concerns of everyday existence and in the cultural traditions of his native island of Trinidad. His realist short stories – and novels like Pitch Lake (1934) and Black Fauns (1935) – helped pioneer West Indian literature and attracted praise from Aldous Huxley. Lowry was inspired by visits to the Far East (1927), Germany (1928), Norway (1931), France (1932), Spain (1933–34), the United States (1934–36), and Mexico (1936–38 and 1945–47), where his masterpiece, Under the Volcano (1947), was set. These countries exerted a long-lasting impression on his literary imagination, which encompassed a kaleidoscopic range of influences from East and West, including esotericism. It was his trajectory toward the New World that was conducive to his acquaintance with Mendes in New York in 1936.

Contributors

Contributors

The translation of images and West Indian creole into Spanish in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners

Abstract Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners is considered a classic of West Indian literature in the style of Migrant Modernism (Brown 2013). First published in post-war London in 1956, it was not translated into Spanish until 2016, probably due to the challenging features of the novel and its language. A case of text creolisation (Buzelin 2000), the translation of the novel required an active effort to construct a language variant that could convey Selvon’s peculiar literary style and sociopolitical intent. The present work aims to investigate the images of West Indians portrayed in the original novel and, more specifically, how they are transposed into the Spanish text. The research method includes an account of the editorial process, an interview with the translator, and an analysis of the paratexts and translation excerpts. Finally, the reception of the translation in literary reviews shall also be discussed.

A Caribbean Visionary and His Literary Collection, Karlene Saundria Nelson

The voices of West Indian writers in the 1950s changed the landscape for Literature emerging out of the West Indies. These powerful literary voices were a means of creating and recording a facet of West Indian history and cultural heritage. West Indian writers wrote their stories through their own eyes. John Hearne was one of the most eloquent voices among them. He became a known voice in the West Indian literary world, using his recognition to facilitate the indigenous West Indian Literature genre’s development. He was also a prominent Jamaican political and social commentator. The John Hearne archive not only produced an important historical picture of the development of the West Indian Literature genre, but West Indian political history, and changes in the cultural and social fabric of the West Indian society, with special emphasis on Jamaica. This paper aims to present this archive as a fundamental body of primary resources for historical research.

Frame Work: Imaging and the Afterlife of Things1

On the occasion of the 37th Annual West Indian Literature Conference held at the University of Miami in 2018, Kevin Adonis Browne autobiographically reflects on what it means to be a Caribbean photographer.

The Port of Santo Domingo: Tidal Debris, Metal Pollution, and the Perils of Poverty where the Caribbean Meets the Ozama

On the occasion of the 37th Annual West Indian Literature Conference held at the University of Miami in 2018, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert engages an ecocritical analysis of Santo Domingo’s fraught environmental history in dialogue with Dominican writers and artists.

Shipscapes: Imagining an Ocean of Space

Dedicated to Sir Wilson Harris 1921–2018 On the occasion of the 37th Annual West Indian Literature Conference held at the University of Miami in 2018, Elizabeth DeLoughrey reflects on the work of Sir Wilson Harris, among others, while exploring Caribbean shipscapes, particularly how the visual and literary arts imagine an “ocean of space.”

Negotiating Alienation and marginality in the Selected Verses of Indo-Guyanese Poet Mahadai Das

Indo-Caribbean literature opens a new vista of study of successful female poets and writers who have contested a literary space for themselves in the arena of West Indian literary discourse. These female writers have boldly denounced any legacy of Eurocentric literature and established their independent school of writing. The emancipation from ‘colonial possessiveness’, (July,1993, p. 80) (a term used by Ramabai Espinet in her writing) and a frantic effort to find new roots in the land of exile are the unique features of Indo-Caribbean literature. A rich cultural heritage, ancestral art, exotic cuisine, customs and costumes are the marks of exclusive oriental culture that is distinctly imprinted in their literature. Indo-Guyanese poetess, Mahadai Das (1954-2003), a prolific poetess of South- Asian descent in her collection of poetry I want to be a Poetess of my People (1977) presents an unparalleled account of the Guyanese people’s journey from immigration to independence. The episodes of violence, mutilation and physical abuse gave Indo-Caribbean female writers a new ability to articulate their woes of immigration and annihilation. The images like sailing back to India, the torments of indentureship and exile as well as racial and political turmoil in the land are interwoven together to form the prime content of their work. These female writers battle the fear of female authorship, since their voice had been long suppressed owing to the monopoly of male literary artists in the mainstream West Indian literature. The present paper proposes to study the theme of alienation and marginality as reflected in the selected verses of Indo-Guyanese writer Mahadai Das.

Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism, by Christopher Taylor

Reviewed by: Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism by Christopher Taylor Theodore Koditschek (bio) Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism, by Christopher Taylor; pp. xi + 307. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018, $104.95, $27.95 paper, £80.00, £20.99 paper. In a world dominated by the competitive logic of free trade, what happens to those groups and places whose diminished profitability consigns them to feelings of abandonment and neglect? Christopher Taylor's Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism gives that question a hefty dose of historical depth. In the eighteenth century, the West Indian sugar colonies had been considered the crown jewel of Britain's mercantilist Empire. Yet, during the nineteenth century, their status radically changed. As slavery was anathematized, and the plantations grew less remunerative, celebrations of success were replaced by anguished handwringing. Once cheaper sources of sugar became available from Brazil and Cuba where (after British emancipation) slavery remained in place, Britain's West Indian colonies increasingly were perceived as embarrassments by a metropolitan public whose attention was turning in other directions. Taylor's interest, however, is in the responses of people in the Caribbean Isles. Taylor begins with Adam Smith and later political economists, whom he portrays as having ushered in the ascendancy of a calculus of self-interest to mainstream metropolitan behavior and thought. Profitable colonies ought to become independent, while unprofitable ones were not worth keeping. In the West Indies, this was perceived as a betrayal of the social contract under which the empire had been forged. In the anonymously published novel Marly (1828) and a series of other texts, the planters offered an alternative vision of plantation protection and social interconnection that drew on nostalgic representations of the mercantilist epoch. But if a social contract could be invoked by the oppressors, it could be refigured by the oppressed in a more compelling way. In chapter 2, Taylor focuses on the loss of protection that emancipation brought to black West Indians exploited under the system of apprenticeship and then left in an unfavorable labor market once the process of emancipation was complete. Through a reading of James Williams's Narrative of Events (1837), Taylor shows how black working people experienced the state of worthlessness to which they were thus consigned. Taylor next traces the mid-century vicissitudes of a planter, Matthew Higgins, who wrapped his demand for a return to protection in the moralizing veneer of defending the freedman. He juxtaposes this against the work of a mixed-race Trinidadian, Michel Philip, whose white father's abandonment inspired novelistic fantasies of revenge. In chapter 4, Taylor follows the career of George Des Sources, another mixed-race Trinidadian, whose disappointment at the refusal of British imperial citizenship motivated him to turn to Hispanic Venezuela, where he induced a group of British West Indian emigrants to establish a utopian socialist colony. Finally, Taylor turns to Mary Seacole, a Jamaican hotelier and nurse who eventually traveled to England and Crimea. There, she applied a nurturant sensibility first cultivated in the West Indies. Because Taylor is a literary scholar, he close reads a wide variety of texts, with the ostensible aim of showing how West Indian literature "emerged as a genre and epistemological alternative to political economy" (9). Yet this book also takes on a less explicit (but far more ambitious) agenda that seeks to reinterpret the entire nineteenth-century West Indian experience though the lens of its inhabitants' perceptions of neglect. Taylor [End Page 331] is an extraordinarily observant reader and intelligent commentator, and he offers gems of insight (occasionally encased in academic jargon) on almost every page. Moreover, he has read widely, including in the vast corpus of books and articles that historians have produced. Nevertheless, he has missed a few significant interventions, and his methodological orientation toward textual exegesis sometimes sends him in one-sided, even doctrinaire directions that a more comprehensive approach to the evidence might have forestalled. Is it really fair to say that the West Indies were neglected by British metropolitans during the nineteenth century? Taylor is far too knowledgeable and sophisticated to make...

West Indian Literature and Federation: Imaginative Accord and Uneven Realities

This essay explores the particular importance conferred on literary expression within a wide range of writings dedicated to understanding and responding to the project of the West Indies Federation. Although federation was conceived, and briefly achieved, as a political expression of community building and people making, the consistent practice of referencing and invoking literary works across these writings reveals the project’s central and necessary investment in the reimagination of identities and belongings. Yet while the literary expression of a West Indian sensibility helped to articulate the political consciousness necessary for change, it could not finally overcome the sources of tension in the region. Importantly, too, the same West Indian writers who symbolized the collective belonging to the region, so cherished by federation, were themselves embroiled in the discordant realities of economic markets and measures and caught between national and international belongings.

Caribbean Voices and the Communicative Failure of the West Indies Federation

This essay argues that the short-lived West Indies Federation (1958–62) was not only undermined by the failure of the regional intelligentsia to comprehensively communicate a narrative of regionalism to the majority of the archipelago’s peoples but also further compromised by the BBC Caribbean Voices literary radio program broadcast to the region between 1943 and 1958. During this fifteen-year period leading up to federation, Caribbean Voices broadcast West Indian literature, as well as critical commentary by the program’s longest serving editor, Henry Swanzy, that generally emphasized territorial rather than regional nationalism. Consequently, the program’s content had the inadvertent effect of undermining the narrative of regionalism, at the popular level, that BBC officialdom and the region’s intelligentsia seemed to have taken for granted. The essay therefore concludes that the narrative failure of federation was prefigured in the widely and more persuasively articulated story of territorial nationalism that was presented in much of the literature and editorial commentary broadcast to the region via Caribbean Voices in the decade and a half leading up to federation.

Migration and Multiplicity of Belonging in Caryl Phillips

The themes of identity, belonging and its reverse, exclusion, have always been central to Caryl Phillips’ works of non-fiction and fiction. In particular, some essays published in two collections, A New World Order (2001) and Colour Me English (2011), and the novel A Distant Shore (2003) investigate to which extent refugees and immigrants are redesigning a new order in the modern globalised world and new notions of belonging and identification based on cultural plurality. In my article I will show the evolution of Phillips’ view on these topics in the first decade of the new millennium, with particular refer- ence to the above-mentioned texts. DOI: 10.17456/SIMPLE-96 Bibliography Ashcroft, Bill. 2010a. Transnation. Janet Wilson, Cristina Sandru & Sarah Lawson Welsh eds. Rerouting the Postcolonial. New Directions for the New Millennium . London-New York: Routledge, 72-85. Ashcroft, Bill. 2010b. Globalization, Transnation and Utopia. W. Goebel & S. Schabio eds. Locatin g Transnational Ideals . New York: Routledge, 13-19. Ashcroft, Bill, 2017. Transnation and the Postcolonial City. Australian Humanities Review , 62 (November): 46-64. Dabydeen, David & Nana Wilson-Tagoe. 1988. A Reader’s Guide to West Indian and Black British Literature . London: Hansib Publishing. Ellis, David. 2013. “They are us”: Caryl Phillips’ A Distant Shore and the British Transnation. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature , 48, 3: 411-423. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic . London-New York: Verso. Gunning, Dave. 2011. Infrahuman Rights, Silence, and the Possibility of Communication in Recent Narratives of Illegality in Britain. Annalisa Oboe & Shaul Bassi eds. Experiences of Freedom in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures . London & New York: Routledge, 141-150. Hall, Stuart. 1997. Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities. Anthony D. King ed. Culture , Globalisation and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 41-68. McLeod, John. 2008. Diaspora and Utopia: Reading the Recent Work of Paul Gilroy and Caryl Phillips. Mark Shacklenton ed. Diasporic Literature and Theory – Where now? Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2-17. Mellino, Miguel. 2003. L’Atlantico nero, ovvero viaggio nell’anti-anti-essenzialismo di Paul Gilroy. Paul Gilroy. The Black Atlantic: L’identita nera tra modernita e doppia coscienza . Roma: Meltemi, 7-15. Phillips, Caryl. 2001. A New World Order . London: Secker & Warburg. Phillips, Caryl. 2003. A Distant Shore . London: Secker & Warburg. Phillips, Caryl. 2011. Colour Me English . London: Harvill Secker. Sarangi, Jaydeep & Patrycja Austin. 2014. Rethinking Postcolonialis: An Interview with Bill Ashcroft. Studia Anglica Resoviensia 11, 85: 131-137. Ward, Abigail. 2012. An Interview with Caryl Phillips. Contemporary Literature , 53, 4: 628-645. http://www.carylphillips.com/ (consulted on 7/9/2018). 2014 International Festival of Literature “Incroci di Civilta”: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=MqYnsoUs71s (consulted on 7/9/2018).

Broadcasting Nature Poetry: Una Marson and the BBC's Overseas Service

Although the nature poems of the Jamaican writer Una Marson are usually set against her transnational projects, they are inextricable from the cosmopolitan vision described in her radio broadcasts and journalism. Studies of transnational modernism have brought to the fore Marson's participation in pan- Africanist political and literary networks, her poems' mediation of the black West Indian woman's experience, and her work promoting West Indian literature in the metropolitan institution of the BBC. Analyses of Marson as a transnational igure, however, have obscured aspects of her literary production—speciically, her nature poetry. Placing Marson's West Indian nature poetry that was broadcast by the BBC in the context of the original programs reveals the efects of moving from print publication to radio broadcast. And, along with her editorials for the Jamaican literary magazineThe Cosmopolitan(1928–31), Marson's BBC broadcasts (1939–45) make the case for the ongoing relevance of the pastoral tradition to public life.

George Lamming y “Voces del Caribe”: discusiones en torno a la autonomía de la literatura angloantillana

Se aborda la controversia sostenida por George Lamming, Derek Walcott, Edward Brathwaite y V.S. Naipaul en torno a la posibilidad de una auténtica literatura anglocaribeña, destacando el papel del programa radial “Voces del Caribe” en la difusión de este debate. Este texto aporta al campo de los estudios literarios caribeños porque se aproxima a la forma en que los intelectuales angloantillanos de mediados de siglo dieron forma a novelísticas y poéticas que, al cuestionar los imaginarios raciales y culturales coloniales, dieron impulso a un proyecto de autonomía estética que dialogó, al mismo tiempo, con otras formas de pensamiento crítico aparecidas en la región. La reflexión se apoya en el análisis textual de los ensayos y obras de ficción de los autores a la luz de la teoría poscolonial, buscando identificar los rasgos ideológicos que legitiman o cuestionan las jerarquías simbólicas manifiestas en las obras. El análisis de las mismas evidencia un modo más autónomo de interrogar, cuestionar y describir dinámicas históricas de alienación y desposesión que se insertan en el entramado discursivo. Esto último es significativo, pues marca la maduración estética de la literatura caribeña en lengua inglesa y sus autores, y de modo paralelo, su entrada en el panorama literario internacional.

The role of literary translators in the West Indian literary field and the importance of Creole

Stemming from the belief in both the potential transformative power of art and the intellectual’s role in social struggles, this article foregrounds the figure of the literary translator as an intellectual that holds the potential to contribute to the advancement of Caribbean narratives through his or her ethically and politically motivated translations. The article uses Pierre Bourdieu’s theorizing to emphasize on the necessarily collaborative nature of the role of literary translators of West Indian literature. Furthermore, since most frequently than not Creole languages are an integral part of West Indian texts, this article pinpoints the translator’s ability to both discern and understand Creole as a crucial aspect for translations to be engaged and participate in regional ideological struggles.

The Rhyming Irons of Abdur-Rahman Slade Hopkinson

Despite being a highly respected member of the Brathwaite-Walcott generation, Abdur-Rahman Slade Hopkinson has received only passing attention from scholars of West Indian literature. In an attempt to foster greater appreciation for a Caribbean artist recently dubbed “the forgotten poet” in his native Guyana, this article uncovers an organizing principle running through Snowscape with Signature (1993), a substantial posthumous selection of Hopkinson's poems that includes both secular and religious verses. The defining characteristic of Hopkinson’s poetry, I argue, involves his careful imbrication of competing notions of poetry as, on the one hand, a space for transcendent aesthetics and, on the other hand, an arena for socio-economic critique. Focusing on poems that are most explicitly about the act of writing poetry, this essay charts Hopkinson’s efforts to work through the familiar predicaments of the postcolonial artist through a distinct and formally imaginative process of invoking and complicating forms and ideas associated with the “Western Tradition.”

Tell Me Where to Look

(2016). Tell Me Where to Look. Caribbean Quarterly: Vol. 62, Caribbean Literary Archives, pp. 321-330.

Of Libraries, Anniversaries and Archives

TOWARDS THE END OF 2011, HEARD THAT THE PUBLIC LIBRARY facility in St George's, Grenada, was closed, and had been closed for four months. This meant that there were no public library and archive facilities in the capital. The facilities at Grenville, the second largest town on the island and the capital of the largest parish, St Andrew's, were also closed. was told that the library there had been destroyed in a fire some time before. The library in another town, Sauteurs, the capital of the northern parish of St Patrick's, had been considered uninhabitable and closed. had no news then of public facilities in other parts of the island, but the message was clear. Library and archive services were threatened. The news came to me as was attending the 30 th Annual West Indian Conference, held at the St Augustine, Trinidad campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI) in October 2011. Because of this, some threads of the story of the library's closing will always in my mind be linked with literature and the UWI. The theme of that West Indian literature conference was Literature and Social Transformation, and the quotation used to promote the theme, I Dream to Change the World, was taken from the poem Looking at Your Hands by the visionary Guyanese poet Martin Carter.The decision to close the library had, learned, been taken because the building was in poor condition. was alarmed, partly because knew that it could take a long time to get things repaired in small, poor countries, and that the decision to focus on books can be as difficult as it often is in a poor family, where other things are considered more important for immediate survival. Perhaps, also, my thoughts went to Jamaica Kincaid's story from years ago about the Antigua library, which, after a natural disaster, had remained closed for years, with an apparently permanent sign announcing, Repairs are pending.1June 2016 was the fifth anniversary of the closing of the Grenada Library. At that Trinidad meeting in October 2011, conveyed my anxiety about the situation to Trinidadian writer and activist Merle Hodge, then a lecturer/professor at UWI St Augustine. perhaps felt that Merle would also be concerned because she knew Grenada, and had been very much a part of political work and sociopolitical and other anxieties during the 1979-83 period. immediately - literally - pointed in the direction of Alison Donnell. Talk to her, she advised. She has a project going about libraries in the Caribbean. Donnell, a professor at Reading University, UK, was involved with a Caribbean project facilitated by the Diasporic Literary Archives International Network. That project, was informed, already had its resources committed to other things, but so began a conversation about Grenada libraries and archives that is still in process. In fact, this story is part of the ongoing conversation.The libraryThe building that has housed the Grenada Library and Archives since 1892 is located on the Carenage, an area curving around the sea in the island's capital, St George's. A plaque on the brick and stone building announces that it is a former warehouse, its structure typical of that of other historic buildings exhibiting colonial architecture on the St George's waterfront. The roof of the building, have been told, is in need of repair, and the building may have other structural problems. Even before it was closed, the archival material housed there was in poor condition. There was no archivist at the public library. Members of staff often found themselves unable to cope with demands. From my own use of the library and archives, intermittently over a number of years, can attest that important material had been crumbling to dust and needed to be preserved. At one time, there were particular folders in the archives that was told should not touch because they were not in good repair and would possibly disintegrate. Like all research spaces, though, this was a much-needed facility, important to researchers for reconstructing aspects of the stories of the country, the region, and the world. …

„Polish up yourself and be no drag”. O anglojęzycznej literaturze karaibskiej po polsku

It is clear that in 2017, 25 years after Derek Walcott received the Nobel Prize for Literature and over a decade after V.S. Naipaul’s accolade, the observation of Montserratian E. A. Markham (2001) that Caribbean authors “no longer have to put the old case that the[ir] work is invisibilised” (13) seems even more justified than in 1989 when it was originally made. However, Caribbean literature is still under-represented in Eastern Europe, an error of exclusion that the present paper ventures to discuss. For decades Polish publishers have been understandably replicating metropolitan canons, zig-zagging between European and American bestsellers. It is only when a Caribbean or Caribbean-British writer gains an international distinction (Walcott, Naipaul) or becomes a worldwide publishing sensation (Zadie Smith, Andrea Levy) that their books are translated. Exceptions to this rule, such as the solitary Polish editions of Caryl Phillips’ A Distant Shore (Muza, 2006), Monique Roffey’s The White Woman on the Green Bicycle (Nasza Księgarnia, 2011) and Kei Miller's The Last Warner Woman (Świat KsiÄ Å¼ki, 2012), or single Francophone Caribbean novels, are few and far between. Arguably, it seems that this politics of translation and publishing stems from the systemic, colonially foisted peripherality of West Indian literature, its being sidelined by the cultural production of the UK as well as the USA, which in turn dominates the curricula of English departments in more culturally homogeneous countries such as Poland. However, what constitutes a major problem for the dissemination (and popularity) of Caribbean Creole literature in Polish is exactly what makes West Indian writing so engaging, multi-layered, polyphonous and intertextual – it is the cultural component (for instance, the translation of “Creole folkways”) that is often misread, misconstrued and, as a consequence, mis-rendered. For that reason, using a number of literary sources, the present paper will attempt to showcase a selection of translatological strategies of coping with, to quote Benjamin Zephaniah, “decipher[ing]/de dread chant” into Polish.