African states have been and are subject to external interference. During the Cold War, the USA and the Soviet Union competed for influence, as did China and France. After the Cold War ended, a decade commenced in which there was fewer external influence but the promotion of a liberal-cosmopolitan order. The rise of China in Africa (and beyond), beginning roughly in 2000 as well as the 9/11 and other terrorist attacks ended that decade of relative calm. A phase of heightened interest in Africa began, particularly in the areas of security, migration, and economic policy, often labelled the “New Scramble for Africa” that continues to the present day.

Chapter 10 lays out the primary methodological motivations behind the book. Because both postcolonialism and tragedy are highly complex, constellation concepts, I argue that they instigate the necessity for thinking closely about the dynamics of comparison, critical theory, interdisciplinarity, and the ethics of reading. I then track the complex relations between historical context and literary texts in postcolonial studies and go on to show some of the ways in which the contrast and comparison of Western notions of tragedy with postcolonial examples forces us to rethink both sides of the coin. I conclude with remarks on the characterological types we have seen in the course of the book – namely the bold (Othello, Okonkwo, Sethe) and the quiet (the Magistrate and Murphy) – and show how they correlate to two different ideas of freedom. There are implications to be derived from postcolonial tragedy for how we think of freedom in today’s world.

There are numerous political crises in Africa, albeit one needs to stress that they do not touch all African states. This chapter discusses four types of crises: secessions, coups, electoral violence, and terrorism. Despite their different shape, they all can potentially challenge or even undermine state institutions, dwarf the economy, and pose a threat to the population. Despite them being the children of the weakness of states, there is, however, also evidence showing that secessions, coups, and electoral violence might lead to more legitimate governments and advance democratization in the long run. Such news is missing with regard to terrorism.

Chapter 6 focuses on how, for Toni Morrison’s Sethe in Beloved, a sense of precarity comes from the brutal conditions of slavery from which she has recently escaped as well as from her own traumatic attempt at murdering her children so as to take them out of the circuitry of enslavement. I isolate the terms of the ethical topos that Morrison so suggestively lays out behind Sethe’s terrible choice and connect this to other aspects of the novel. These historical and personal details about the violence of slavery form a potent background to our reading of the novel and allow us to attend closely to the problem of moral residue that is seen most tellingly in Baby Suggs’s response to Sethe’s choice. I return to Aristotle’s anagnorisis (but this time split between two characters) as a way of reviewing one of the central concepts of tragedy.

This essay examines how Mary Seacole’s autobiography-cum-travelogue, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (1857), uses revisionary mimicry to engage the tropological schema of colonial and imperial discourses. Seacole artfully deploys recodings and revisions that generate a nascent poetics of colonial identity and subjectivity. Her narrative unfolds as a drama of self-construction that locates the individual colonial subject within the nexus of mid-Victorian ideologies of industry, adventure, gender, race, and nation. It reverses the trajectory of imperial travel narratives as it relates the struggle to move from the colonial periphery to the imperial centre. Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands complicates contemporary attempts to define it as counter-discourse, as it is permeated by contradictions and ambiguities that highlight the problematic nature of hybridity in Seacole’s own self-construction. Wonderful Adventures is thus marked by the implicit tensions of Caribbean colonial relations despite Seacole’s apparent erasure of the politics of the post-Emancipation British Caribbean.

During the decolonization era in the Caribbean, writers from throughout the region shaped visions of nationalism and anticolonialism through engaging with francophone Caribbean history and culture. Haiti in particular played a major symbolic role. Looking back to the Haitian Revolution offered anticolonial writers ways of thinking about challenging imperialism as well as lessons for independence. At the same time, Haitian indigénisme and the versions of Haitian culture and religion that circulated internationally during the US occupation inspired a reconsideration of the Africanness of Caribbean culture. This chapter will also make comparisons to the francophone Negritude movement centred especially in Martinique and its revaluation of Africa through Haiti. Writers considered include C. L. R. James, Derek Walcott, Eric Walrond, Kamau Brathwaite, George Lamming, Jean Rhys, Alejo Carpentier, Édouard Glissant, and Aimé Césaire.

Caribbean literature from the mid twentieth century is often centrally concerned with nationalism and independence. But literature from this period, both within the anglophone Caribbean and across the pan-Caribbean region, also responded to a series of other – sometimes complementary, sometimes competing – political projects. This chapter looks at how literature represented and addressed institutional changes such as the rise of trade unions, the development of political parties and constitutional changes in the anglophone Caribbean; the advent of DOM status in the French Caribbean; Puerto Rico’s anomalous status as an Associated Free State of the USA; Cuba’s annexation into the US economy; and the Cuban Revolution. Writers sought to document these changes, to mobilize social movements, and to imagine new political possibilities. In the process, they negotiated the push and pull between literary commitment and artistic freedom. For a variety of reasons, anglophone literary figures were often drawn to West Indian federation. Even after federation failed, writers still frequently couched their nationalism in regional terms and looked to various pan-Caribbean inspirations for a larger vision of citizenship and community. This chapter will examine how writers from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s sought to support, critique, and navigate the political transformations of the era.

Although characterized by generational shifts in terms of articulating cultural affiliations and attachments to both the Caribbean and Britain, Caribbean British writing remains deeply marked by issues of un/belonging. This essay explores this embedded thematic across changing political contexts and reads the transitions in Caribbean British literature that have brought different revisionary perspectives on literary forms and languages, post-Windrush British history and the much deeper historical connections between the Caribbean presence and the UK. As well as contesting racism, these works articulate intersectional identities informed by class, gender and sexuality as it is experienced within and across the UK and the Caribbean. Given that contemporary Caribbean British literature is very much connected with Caribbean literature and that of the larger diaspora, this essay considers the modes of critical attention necessary to engage with its new forms and platforms.

With the aim of unravelling the role of popular culture in contemporary Caribbean writing, this essay focuses on how calypso, carnival and dancehall cultures have been used in the work of post-millennial Caribbean writers to examine issues of gender and sexuality. Caribbean writers employ innovative textual strategies, which draw thematically and stylistically from music and carnival. These textual strategies challenge the perceived boundaries between oral and scribal and between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures, and they can create a platform from which to challenge misogyny, patriarchy and social injustice in the contemporary Caribbean and beyond.

This essay explores the legacy and afterlife of François Macandal, a man who escaped enslavement on an eighteenth-century plantation in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. His fame as a poisoner and immortal rebel persist over time and space, reflecting transcaribbean associations of fetish making with spiritual and physical resistance on the plantation. Stories of Macandal and the fetish objects he crafted, also called macandals, continued to circulate in nineteenth-century Louisiana as one of many narratives of slave uprising and Revolution in the Americas. One example of the reach of Macandal’s story is the 1892 novel, Le Macandal: Épisode de l’Insurrection des Noirs à St. Domingue, published in New Orleans, Louisiana, by Marie-Joséphine Augustin. This work is part of a larger archive of how Macandal and his macandals shaped the literary realm. His story moves across genres arguing that Macandal is simultaneously the man, the fetish object, and the story in its many forms.

Since the West Indies saw the forced introduction of the most enslaved Africans in all of the Americas, the most written about element of pre-twentieth-century Caribbean writing in contemporary scholarship is without a doubt plantation slavery, including abolition and slave revolt and rebellion. However, even while drawing attention to these concerns, much of nineteenth-century Caribbean writing, in the works of Cuba’s Félix Varela, Haiti’s Émeric Bergeaud, and Puerto Rico’s Ramón Emeterio Betances, for example, also shows distinct concerns with ideas of sovereignty. Rather than illustrating an obsessive concern with racialized revolution or at once idyllic and treacherous scenes of tropical paradise, the Caribbean writers under discussion in this essay demonstrate a clear shift towards trying to determine the meaning of freedom in a life after slavery, and what kinds of new identities the inhabitants of a post-slavery Caribbean might take on.

The digital restaging of early Caribbean texts includes critical efforts by scholars, librarians, archivists, and others working together to identify, locate, digitize, and put in place supports for online access and long-term digital preservation. Digital preservation and access to lost, rare, or hard-to-find literary archives have revolutionized Caribbean literary history and scholarship. This essay covers digital restaging in relation to concerns for access, the importance of scholarly bibliographies and collaboration for identifying literary texts for digitization and contextualization, and the importance of digital libraries in enabling the transition, focusing specifically on the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC). This chapter concludes with the significance of digital humanities programmes and projects in Caribbean Studies for continuing the work of bibliographies and inventories.

This essay explores several Emancipation-era novels reflecting the prevalence of the cross-cultural exchanges that defined Caribbean life at mid-nineteenth century, processes that are not readily apparent when looking at the region’s fiction through the lens of discrete anglophone, francophone, or hispanophone literary studies. Despite their different linguistic and cultural orientations, novelists like E. L. Joseph, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, and Juan José Nieto share an engagement with issues and themes that continue to define Caribbean literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Thus, even as the conditions of each novel’s production are unique – whether created by a Cuban-born abolitionist writing of her native island from Spain (Avellaneda), or by an affiliate of Trinidad’s post-Emancipation planter class (Joseph), or by a political refugee from Colombia (Nieto) – they all exhibit a self-reflexive concept of caribeñidad or Caribbeanness. In so doing they also mark a point when the novel of the Caribbean became the Caribbean novel.

This essay discusses a series of links connecting Caribbean literature and the visual arts, paying particular attention to shared conceptual, critical preoccupations and visual vocabularies, as well as rhetorical strategies and aesthetic across art forms. It traces important stages in the ongoing dialogue between literature and art, including the foundational role of interdisciplinary movements, journals, art spaces and collaborations among writers and artists.

This essay explores how authors, texts, and forms moved throughout the Caribbean in the period, transgressing boundaries of language and geography. Regional responses to the Haitian Revolution and other Caribbean antislavery and anticolonial movements reveal the clear trans-Caribbean focus of many nineteenth-century Caribbean writers. Additionally, the growing sphere of newspapers provided a concrete means through which ideas circulated throughout the region. This chapter looks primarily to Haiti and Trinidad as early examples through which to consider literary anglophone–francophone connections and the formations of Caribbean identity that heavily influenced later Caribbean writers. I argue that the circulation of ideas and authors in the period ultimately generated complex negotiation of contested spaces, shifting boundaries, and complex identities that gave rise to conceptions of creoleness and exile that are foundational to Caribbean literature.