The essay surveys a broad selection of literary responses to tourism, which plays a significant role in the Caribbean. While the tourism economy is not inconsequential, the authors in focus tend to portray the commercialization and commodification of the archipelago, often marketed through the fantasy of paradise islands, in a negative light. Targeting the ‘leisure imperialism’ of tourism ideology, they trace an unsettling legacy in which the violent past of sugar and slavery survives in the smiling servitude of industrialized tourism. The superficial discourse of love and peace, the hedonism imposed on the sunny tropics, the supposedly willing sycophancy of the locals eager to please wealthy tourists are all dismantled through humour and dark satire to reveal a bleak underside of drugs, sex, exploitation, antipathy and social rot. However, calls for responsible, ‘slow’ tourism more beneficial to the locals hope that the industry may be ethically operated.

The United States Civil War, and the resulting end of slavery on the North American continent, reverberated throughout the Caribbean and in its political writing. This essay first examines how how both pro- and and anti-slavery activists interpreted the Civil War in the Spanish Empire and used its example to defend or attack slavery. Next, it describes how the war led to widespread protest of the conditions of post-emancipation Jamaica and, eventually, led to the Morant Bay rebellion.

My essay utilizes a comparative interdisciplinary approach to read William Beckford’s A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica (1790) alongside paintings and prints of his Jamaican estates by George Robertson. The essay considers how Caribbean people see their landscape, but more crucially how that seeing has been shaped by visual and scribal pre-texts. As Helen Tiffin argues, Caribbean people’s relation to their landscape is linked ‘with histories of transplantation, slavery and colonialism’ but also with our assimilation of ‘imported European traditions of land and landscape perception and representation’. How we see the Caribbean landscape now is largely determined by earlier ways of seeing which constructed tropical colonies. With Krista Thompson and Jill Casid, I argue that ‘imperial picturesque landscaping aesthetics’ in Beckford’s text are reinforced by the images, to naturalize colonial transplantation and mask the materialist matrix of the plantation economy by imposing a screen of picturesque composition.

The white female planter is an understudied figure in Caribbean history and literature. This essay follows the idea of the gendered responsibility to memory using the methodology of feminist rehearsal to examine representations of white women plantation owners in a range of contemporary Caribbean novels. The essay recounts the heated debates among the region’s literary critics and writers around the status of the white woman as author and character, while also looking at the literary characterization of women who had titular (or representative) plantation power and others who owned plantations outright. Most of the novels deploy intertextuality and multiple timelines to recuperate and consciously rehearse experiences missing or invisible in official chronicles. These novels explore the intersectional ideological negotiations that shaped the imperial spaces of the plantation and the lives that were lived within that terrain.

The globalizing and interconnecting effects of technology in the twenty-first century have had a crucial impact on the development of Caribbean literary culture and the reconfiguration of its audiences. Caribbean writing and literary criticism are reaching wider audiences within the region and beyond via myriad digital platforms. Through social media, blogs, online journals, digital archives and the websites of publishing houses and festivals, the news and content of Caribbean literary work has become more accessible. Examining networks of ‘digital yards’, a concept built on Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s work, this essay surveys twenty-first century forms of digital Caribbean literary production while considering the continuities that remain between earlier forms of representation and Caribbean literary culture online today.

This essay examines the anonymous serialization of George Numa Des Sources’s novella Adolphus, A Tale (1853) in The Trinidadian, a radical Brown newspaper published in Port of Spain. The plot – a romance about a Brown Trinidadian exiled in Venezuela – mirrors Des Sources’s own emigration scheme for founding a utopian socialist colony in eastern Venezuela. Written after emancipation but set during slavery, Adolphus evinces what I call 'nonhistorical' fiction, foregrounding how the experiences of enslavement disrupt not only the temporal linearity of History (what Édouard Glissant calls 'nonhistory'), but also the ideological continuities that Georg Lukács argues define the post-1848 historical novel. By narrating an alternative past (one in which the protagonist and Simón Bolívar form a transnational alliance and collaborate to advance the mission of multiracial democracy), Des Sources forges the nonhistorical foundation for the future that his emigrant colony hoped to realize.

This essay charts key aspects of the development of canonical literary criticism in the English-speaking Caribbean. It argues that a full understanding of the ways in which proliferating critical statements coalesced into a major body of evaluative work across the decades, from the 1930s through the 1970s, needs to account for the diverse and intersecting communicative platforms the criticism relied upon. The burgeoning criticism responded to the blossoming of anglophone Caribbean literature in the post World War II period via print venues such as Bim in Barbados, Kyk-over-al in Guyana, and the Jamaica Journal and Caribbean Quarterly in Jamaica. In addition, during the decades of the 1940s and 1950s, the BBC literary radio programme Caribbean Voices functioned as a platform for the production and dissemination of Caribbean literary and cultural criticism. As such, the development of the critical canon in the anglophone Caribbean is not only the story of intersecting and mutually supportive media, print and electronic, but also the story of transatlantic knowledge flows. The essay therefore proposes that the intersection of print and electronic media and the robust transatlantic knowledge flows call into question, in the contemporary moment, any enduring distinction between those putative binaries that energized so many of the critical arguments of the period, viz. home vs. exile, oral vs. scribal, and folk criticism vs. cosmopolitan practice.

Since the seventeenth century, the Caribbean existed in the European imagination as a place of unfreedom, in opposition to European enlightenment and liberty. But the voices of the enslaved in the Caribbean, which are often tucked away in the writings of others, such as spiritual and conversion narratives, abolitionist speeches and portraits in ‘manners and customs’ accounts, or more ephemeral narrative fragments – offer a more complicated picture. Compared to the United States, far fewer texts that conform to the slave narrative genre survived from the Caribbean, and virtually all are mediated by a white amanuensis. This essay argues that despite this mediation, the slave narrative can be understood as dialogic, as a combined effort. Grounded in the notion of ‘creole testimony’ – a hybrid version that combines written with oral input and insists on reading against the grain to hear the subaltern’s voice – this essay demonstrates the utility of this strategy through reading several narratives by enslaved Caribbean women.

Very little has been written on Anglophone Caribbean theatre (the few publications include work by Judy Stone, Errol Hill, Richardson Wright, Rex Nettleford, and Wycliffe and Hazel Bennett). As for theatre from the French-speaking Caribbean, it also remains an understudied field. A few book-length studies (Bérard, Sahakian, Artheron) on theatre from the French Caribbean (Martinique, Guadeloupe. and French Guyana) have emerged in recent years; however, the extraordinary and rich theatre tradition of Haiti has been almost entirely neglected by scholars and critics of Caribbean theatre. Yet drama, in the form of dance theatre, music theatre, various forms of ritual theatre, political theatre, and national pantomimes, has not only been at the heart of the Caribbean literary and cultural sensibility. The genre in its various forms has played a major role in nationalist movements across the Caribbean, and in attempts at cultural decolonization viewed as indispensable to processes of political and social decolonization. This paper focuses on ritual theatre during the decades of the 1930s to the 1970s in the English- and French-speaking Caribbean, an era in playwriting and staging marked by returns to the Haitian Revolution; major investments in history; ancestral recuperation; politics and traditional culture; and cultural decolonization through the project of rewriting colonial narratives. I argue that ritual theatrical forms, enlisting Afro-derived Caribbean ontologies, reflected the importance of the sacred in affecting the material conditions of existence in the colonized post-slavery societies of the Caribbean.

This essay examines significant trends in Caribbean drama and performance since 1970. From Errol Hill’s vision of a Caribbean national theatre rooted in the traditions of carnival, to Derek Walcott’s engagement with the conditions of colonialism, syncretism is key. Folk and popular culture have assumed a prominent place within Caribbean theatre as part of the process of artistic decolonization. The essay examines plays by Patrick Chamoiseau and Patricia Cumper, which engage in ‘canonical counter-discourse’, before turning to works which explore Afrocentrism and an independent Caribbean identity (seen in the dramas of Hill and Walcott). Performances committed to the consideration of domestic political contexts, foregrounding issues of gender and class, are explored in the work of the Sistren Theatre Collective and Grupo Teatro Escambray, while their legacies are seen in the queer theatre work of Caribbean diaspora artists such as d’bi.young anitafrika and Staceyann Chin.

In the mid twentieth century, writers such as V. S. Naipaul, Sam Selvon, Ismith Khan, and Peter Kempadoo produced stories and novels that were often received and understood in terms of the nationalist writing of the period. At the same time, their work represented in important ways Indo-Caribbean experiences that often complicated narratives of the nation and drew attention to tensions mapped onto perceived ethnic differences, such as those examined in Selvon’s lecture ‘Three Into One Can’t Go – East Indian, Trinidadian, West Indian’. Looking at the first published novels of Kempadoo, Naipaul, Selvon, and Khan, this chapter assesses the ways in which these writers represent the spatial, racial, and classed complexities of establishing one’s identity as an Indo-Caribbean man in the post-slavery and post-indentureship spaces of Guyana and Trinidad. Comparing the authors’ various approaches to themes of gender relations, belonging, cross-racial relations, and shifting class identity in both local and global contexts, the chapter lays out the unique and unsettled nature of Indo-Caribbean masculinity in the mid twentieth century. By pulling back the lens to focus on four Indo-Caribbean writers’ explorations of masculinity in their first novels, the chapter also provides a context and counter to the global dominance of V. S. Naipaul’s depictions of this subject position.

The parallel and intersecting relationships among the written and oral literatures, folklore, musics, performative arts, and orature of the Anglophone Caribbean have been well documented, giving rise to a large body of critical work in literary and cultural studies by scholars such as Mervyn Morris, Kamau Brathwaite, Gordon Rohlehr, and Funso Ayejina. Sustained treatments such as Carolyn Cooper’s Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (1993), Kwame Dawes’ Natural Mysticism: Towards a New Reggae Aesthetic in Caribbean Writing (1999), and special issues of academic journals illustrate the growing acknowledgement of these oral–scribal intersections. With a steady growth from the 1920s onward, these cross-genre, cross-media fertilizations reached a high point in the 1970s with the rise and globalization of new forms/expressions of urban music, against the background of major local, regional, and global shifts such as the escalation of nationalist contentions; the Black Power movement; and in Jamaica, the ‘official’ recognition of Rastafari, and the emergence of new dub poetry and other newer genres. The consolidation and recognition of the synergies between orature and literature have in turn fashioned a substantial body of theorizations and scholarly contemplations out of which have emerged terms such as oraliterature, novelylspo, reggae aesthetic, among others.

Waves of early twentieth-century Asian migration to the Caribbean and Afro-Caribbean migration to and from Panama bankrolled the education of a new black and brown middle class. This essay argues that we can hold more of the Caribbean literary tradition within a single frame if we reconfigure the archive so as to highlight the moments when the educational advances the concurrent migrations facilitated allowed both African and Asian Caribbean communities to exert greater control over the terms of their representation. It advances three approaches to rethinking Caribbean literary history. The first examines how early twentieth-century Caribbean fiction represents both groups’ changing attitudes towards money and modern subjectivity. The second considers how migrants’ counterintuitive investments in imperial expansion complicate the political stakes in Caribbean nationalist narratives. The third juxtaposes literary and non-literary forms of cultural production in Jamaica and Panama to demonstrate how, in privileging written texts, we obscure the contributions marginalized groups make to what we think of as national cultures.