The West Indian Novel and Its Background

The West Indian Novel and Its Background

Author: Kenneth Ramchand

Publisher: Ian Randle Publishers

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 9766371512

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An account of the emergence of the West Indian novel in English, this work provides valuable insights into the social, cultural and political background, offering concise and focused accounts of the growth of education, the development of literacy, and the formation of West Indian Creole languages.


Narratives of Obeah in West Indian Literature

Narratives of Obeah in West Indian Literature

Author: Janelle Rodriques

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-04-05

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 0429998651

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This book explores representations of Obeah – a name used in the English/Creole-speaking Caribbean to describe various African-derived, syncretic Caribbean religious practices – across a range of prose fictions published in the twentieth century by West Indian authors. In the Caribbean and its diasporas, Obeah often manifests in the casting of spells, the administration of baths and potions of various oils, herbs, roots and powders, and sometimes spirit possession, for the purposes of protection, revenge, health and well-being. In most Caribbean territories, the practice – and practices that may resemble it – remains illegal. Narratives of Obeah in West Indian Literature analyses fiction that employs Obeah as a marker of the Black ‘folk’ aesthetics that are now constitutive of West Indian literary and cultural production, either in resistance to colonial ideology or in service of the same. These texts foreground Obeah as a social and cultural logic both integral to and troublesome within the creation of such a thing as ‘West Indian’ literature and culture, at once a product of and a foil to Caribbean plantation societies. This book explores the presentation of Obeah as an ‘unruly’ narrative subject, one that not only subverts but signifies a lasting ‘Afro-folk’ sensibility within colonial and ‘postcolonial’ writing of the West Indies. Narratives of Obeah in West Indian Literature will be of interest to scholars and students of Caribbean Literature, Diaspora Studies, and African and Caribbean religious studies; it will also contribute to dialogues of spirituality in the wider Black Atlantic.


Making West Indian Literature

Making West Indian Literature

Author: Mervyn Morris

Publisher: Ian Randle Publishers

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 145

ISBN-13: 9766371741

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"West Indian Literature, as a body of work, is a fairly recent phenomenon; and literary criticism has not always acknowledged the diversity of approaches to writing effectively. In Making West Indian Literature poet and critic Mervyn Morris explores examples of West Indian creativity shaping a range of responses to experience, which often includes colonial traces. Appreciating various kinds of making and a number of West Indian makers, these engaging essays and interviews display a recurrent interest in the processes of composition. Some of the prices highlight writer-performers who have not often been examined. This very readable book, often personal in tone, makes a distinctive contribution to the knowledge and understanding of West Indian Literature. "


Caribbean Literature in English

Caribbean Literature in English

Author: Louis James

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-07-30

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1317871227

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Caribbean Literature in English places its subject in its precise regional context. The `Caribbean', generally considered as one area, is highly discrete in its topography, race and languages, including mainland Guyana, the Atlantic island of Barbados, the Lesser Antilles, Trinidad, and Jamaica, whose size and history gave it an early sense of separate nationhood. Beginning with Raleigh's Discoverie of...Guiana (1596), this innovative study traces the sometimes surprising evolution of cultures which shared a common experience of slavery, but were intimately related to individual local areas. The approach is interdisciplinary, examining the heritage of the plantation era, and the issues of language and racial identity it created. From this base, Louis James reassesses the phenomenal expansion of writing in the contemporary period. He traces the influence of pan-Caribbean movements and the creation of an expatriate Caribbean identity in Britain and America: `Brit'n' is considered as a West Indian island, created by `colonization in reverse'. Further sections treat the development of a Caribbean aesthetic, and the repossession of cultural roots from Africa and Asia. Balancing an awareness of the regional identity of Caribbean literature with an exploration of its place in world and postcolonial literatures, this study offers a panoramic view that has become one of the most vital of the `new literatures in English'. This accessible overview of Caribbean writing will appeal to the general reader and student alike, and particularly to all who are interested in or studying Caribbean literatures and culture, postcolonial studies, Commonwealth 'new literatures' and contemporary literature and drama.


Wholeness and Home in West Indian Literature

Wholeness and Home in West Indian Literature

Author: Daizal R. Samad

Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers

Published: 2023-08-18

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 1398463795

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WHOLENESS AND HOME IN WEST INDIAN LITERATURE is an invaluable resource for everyone who has an interest in West Indian literature or Culture, West Indian Society or History, Ethnic Tensions, and Psychic Heterogeneity. It is especially useful for university and secondary school students and teachers who teach or need to learn about writers from the West Indies. It offers unique critical insights into the works of globally renowned writers who hail from the Caribbean: V.S. Naipaul, George Lamming, Wilson Harris, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, John Hearn, Jean Rhys, and Derek Walcott. WHOLENESS AND HOME is important reading for any student of ethnic relations. The book focuses on the possibilities of a culture that had its very beginnings in genocide and in the forced or fraudulent fetching of human beings from many other places. These people were pitted against each other to ensure division and assure plantation profitability. This book examines how major West Indian writers capture this initial ethnic antagonism that now infects much of the world. WHOLENESS AND HOME also insists on the futility of racism and bigotry by pointing to the enormous potential for social harmony. At the very least, Samad and Harripersaud offer excellent examples of essay writing for teachers and students, especially those at the university and college levels.


A History of Literature in the Caribbean

A History of Literature in the Caribbean

Author: A. James Arnold

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2001-07-23

Total Pages: 682

ISBN-13: 9027298335

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For the first time the Dutch-speaking regions of the Caribbean and Suriname are brought into fruitful dialogue with another major American literature, that of the anglophone Caribbean. The results are as stimulating as they are unexpected. The editors have coordinated the work of a distinguished international team of specialists. Read separately or as a set of three volumes, the History of Literature in the Caribbean is designed to serve as the primary reference book in this area. The reader can follow the comparative evolution of a literary genre or plot the development of a set of historical problems under the appropriate heading for the English- or Dutch-speaking region. An extensive index to names and dates of authors and significant historical figures completes the volume. The subeditors bring to their respective specialty areas a wealth of Caribbeanist experience. Vera M. Kutzinski is Professor of English, American, and Afro-American Literature at Yale University. Her book Sugar’s Secrets: Race and The Erotics of Cuban Nationalism, 1993, treated a crucial subject in the romance of the Caribbean nation. Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger has been very active in Latin American and Caribbean literary criticism for two decades, first at the Free University in Berlin and later at the University of Maryland. The editor of A History of Literature in the Caribbean, A. James Arnold, is Professor of French at the University of Virginia, where he founded the New World Studies graduate program. Over the past twenty years he has been a pioneer in the historical study of the Négritude movement and its successors in the francophone Caribbean.


The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean Since 1950

The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean Since 1950

Author: Simon Gikandi

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 608

ISBN-13: 019976509X

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The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean since 1950 examines the institutional and social peculiarities that make fiction produced in Africa and the Atlantic World since 1950 important to the history of the novel in English.


Philosophy in the West Indian Novel

Philosophy in the West Indian Novel

Author: Earl McKenzie

Publisher:

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13:

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Earl McKenzie's pioneering philosophical study of the West Indian novel is based on three main assumptions: first, that philosophy is a reflection on the fundamental questions we can ask about ourselves and our world; second, that literature, particularly the novel, is the best method yet devised to provide a "human face" to these reflections; and third, Caribbean philosophy is at present embedded in other forms of cultural expression, like literature, and these forms need to be excavated to reveal what lies within. McKenzie examines ten novels by George Lamming, Roger Mais, Wilson Harris, V.S. Naipaul, Orlando Patterson, Jean Rhys, Erna Brodber, Lakshmi Persaud, Earl Lovelace and Jamaica Kincaid, each selected to represent differences in geography, chronology, ethnicity and gender. In this cross-section of novels, McKenzie identifies ancestral influences from the philosophies of Europe, Africa and India, and show how West Indian fiction embodies ideas from several areas of philosophy, including metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of education, social and political philosophy, ethics, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of literature. Philosophy in the West Indian Novel uncovers sections of the mostly unknown Caribbean philosophical mosaic, and McKenzie's work will encourage further study and refection on philosophical ideas in a Caribbean context. It will be of interest to philosophers, literary critics, educators, social scientists, and anyone interested in Caribbean studies.