This Companion is divided into six sections that provide an introduction to and critical history of the field, discussions of key texts and a critical debate on major topics such as the nation, race, gender and migration. In the final section contributors examine the material dissemination of Caribbean literature and point towards the new directions that Caribbean literature and criticism are taking.

Studying the literature written in the West Indies as a regionally unified corpus with its own identity, this analysis examines the recurring thematic motifs and formal devices that Caribbean literary artists have drawn from during the last six decades. The dynamic study isolates the writers' engagements with language, religion, and history as primary components of their cultural discourse and argues that West Indian literary texts contain clues to their own explication. Including authors from the Dominican Republic, Barbados, and Haiti, this volume is one of the few that explores the writing of all Caribbean language regions.

Major biographical reference work covering the lives and legacies of notable Afro-descendants from the Caribbean and Latin American, men and women from all eras and walks of life. This groundbreaking resource provides unprecedented coverage of the region through the lives of its people. The Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography (DCALAB) will be published in print with over two thousand in-depth historical biographies of Caribbeans and Latin Americans. From Toussaint L'Ouverture to Celia Cruz to Pele, the DCALAB provides rigorous scholarship on the people that have shaped the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. The print work is only the first step in an ongoing research and publishing project, which will continue to grow online as part of the African American Studies Center.

Bringing together the most exciting recent archival work in anglophone, francophone, and hispanophone Caribbean studies, Raphael Dalleo constructs a new literary history of the region that is both comprehensive and innovative. He examines how changes in political, economic, and social structures have produced different sets of possibilities for writers to imagine their relationship to the institutions of the public sphere. In the process, he provides a new context for rereading such major writers as Mary Seacole, José Martí, Jacques Roumain, Claude McKay, Marie Chauvet, and George Lamming, while also drawing lesser-known figures into the story.

The Caribbean Novel Since 1945 offers a comparative analysis of fiction from across the pan-Caribbean, exploring the relationship between literary form, cultural practice, and the nation-state. Engaging with the historical and political impact of capitalist imperialism, decolonization, class struggle, ethnic conflict, and gender relations, it considers the ways in which Caribbean authors have sought to rethink and re-narrate the traumatic past and often problematic 'postcolonial' present of the region's peoples. It pays particular attention to the role cultural practices such as stickfighting and Carnival, as well as religious rituals and beliefs like Vodou and Myal, have played in efforts to reshape the novel form. The scope of the analysis is varied and comprehensive, covering both critically acclaimed and lesser-known authors from the Anglophone, Francophone, and Hispanophone traditions.

This book tells the story of how intellectuals in the English-speaking Caribbean first created a distinctly Caribbean and national literature. As traditionally told, this story begins in the 1950s with the arrival and triumph of V.S. Naipaul, George Lamming, and their peers in the London literary scene. However, Afro-Caribbeans were writing literature already in the 1840s as part of larger movements for political rights, economic opportunity, and social status. Rosenberg offers a history ofthis first one hundred years of anglophone Caribbean literature and a critique of Caribbean literary studies that explains its neglect.

Afro-Greeks examines the reception of Classics in the English-speaking Caribbean, from about 1920 to the beginning of the 21st century. Emily Greenwood focuses on the ways in which Greco-Roman antiquity has been put to creative use in Anglophone Caribbean literature, and relates this regional classical tradition to the educational context, specifically the way in which Classics was taught in the colonial school curriculum. Discussions of Caribbean literature tend to assume an antagonistic relationship between Classics, which is treated as a legacy of empire, and Caribbean literature. While acknowledging this imperial and colonial backstory, Greenwood argues that Caribbean writers such as Kamau Brathwaite, C. L. R. James, V. S. Naipaul, and Derek Walcott have successfully appropriated Classics and adapted it to the cultural context of the Caribbean, creating a distinctive, regional tradition.

While recognizing its origins and scope, Alejandro A. Vallega offers a new interpretation of Latin American philosophy by looking at its radical and transformative roots. Placing it in dialogue with Western philosophical traditions, Vallega examines developments in gender studies, race theory, postcolonial theory, and the legacy of cultural dependency in light of the Latin American experience. He explores Latin America's engagement with contemporary problems in Western philosophy and describes the transformative impact of this encounter on contemporary thought.

Dazzled by the sight of the vast treasure of gold and silver being unloaded at Seville's docks in 1537, a teenaged Pedro de Cieza de León vowed to join the Spanish effort in the New World, become an explorer, and write what would become the earliest historical account of the conquest of Peru. Available for the first time in English, this history of Peru is based largely on interviews with Cieza's conquistador compatriates, as well as with Indian informants knowledgeable of the Incan past. Alexandra Parma Cook and Noble David Cook present this recently discovered third book of a four-part chronicle that provides the most thorough and definitive record of the birth of modern Andean America. It describes with unparalleled detail the exploration of the Pacific coast of South America led by Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro, the imprisonment and death of the Inca Atahualpa, the Indian resistance, and the ultimate Spanish domination. Students and scholars of Latin American history and conquest narratives will welcome the publication of this volume.

Unlike the American and French Revolutions, the Haitian Revolution was the first in a modern state to implement human rights universally and unconditionally. Going well beyond the selective emancipation of white adult male property owners, the Haitian Revolution is of vital importance, Nick Nesbitt argues, in thinking today about the urgent problems of social justice, human rights, imperialism, torture, and, above all, human freedom. Combining archival research, political philosophy, and intellectual history, Nesbitt explores this fundamental event of modern history--the invention of universal emancipation--both in the context of the Age of Enlightenment (Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel) and in relation to certain key figures (Rancière, Laclau, Habermas) and trends (such as the turn to ethics, human rights, and universalism) in contemporary political philosophy. In doing so, he elucidates the theoretical implications of Haiti's revolution both for the eighteenth century and for the twenty-first century. Universal Emancipation will be of interest not only to scholars and students of the Haitian Revolution and postcolonial francophone studies but also to readers interested in critical theory and its relation to history and political science.

In an extensive collection of essays spanning 50 years of sustained scholarship, The Negritude Moment explores the many varied aspects of Negritude - both as a concept and as a movement. F. Abiola Irele provides an account of its historical origins and examines the sociological and ideological background of themes that have preoccupied French-speaking black writers and intellectuals.

The Changing Face of Afro-Caribbean Cultural Identity: Negrismo and Negritude looks primarily at Negrismo and Negritude, two literary movements that appeared in the Francophone and Hispanic Caribbean as well as in Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century. It draws on speeches and manifestos, and use cultural studies to contextualize ideas. It poses the bases of both movements in the Caribbean and in Africa, and lays out the literary antecedents that influenced or shaped both movements. Ultimately, this is a book on Caribbean cultural identity that shows it in a slippery and fluctuating zone. By demonstrating that while the founders of the Negritude movement both identified themselves as descendants of Africans and were proud to proclaim their African heritage, the members of the Antillanite and Creolite movements see themselves as a product of miscegenation between different cultures.

In the aftermath of World War II, Paulette Nardal, the Martinican woman most famously associated with the Negritude movement and its founders Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, and Léon Damas during Paris’s interwar years, founded the journal Woman in the City. This annotated translation, with an introduction and essay summaries by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, collects work from that journal, and presents it in both the original French and in English. Never before translated, these essays represent a lens through which to view the evolution of Nardal’s intellectual thought on race, gender, politics, globalization, war, religion, and philosophy.

This study examines the work of three important 20th century Caribbean poets, focusing on one major work by each of them: Pales Matos' 'Tuntun de pasa y griferia' (Puerto Rico); Cesaire's 'Cahier d'un retour au pays natal' (Martinique), and Derek Walcott's 'Omeros' (St. Lucia).

In this breakthrough study, Emily Maguire examines how a cadre of writers reimagined the nation and re-valorized Afro-Cuban culture through a textual production that incorporated elements of the ethnographic with the literary. Singling out the work of Lydia Cabrera as emblematic of the experimentation with genre that characterized the age, Maguire constructs a series of counterpoints that place Cabrera's work in dialogue with that of her Cuban contemporaries--including Fernando Ortiz, Nicolás Guillén, and Alejo Carpentier. An illuminating final chapter on Cabrera and Zora Neale Hurston widens the scope to contextualize Cuban texts within a hemispheric movement to represent black culture.

In Migrant Modernism, J. Dillon Brown examines the intersection between British literary modernism and the foundational West Indian novels that emerged in London after World War II. By emphasizing the location in which anglophone Caribbean writers such as George Lamming, V. S. Naipaul, and Samuel Selvon produced and published their work, Brown reveals a dynamic convergence between modernism and postcolonial literature that has often been ignored. Modernist techniques not only provided a way for these writers to mark their difference from the aggressively English, literalist aesthetic that dominated postwar literature in London but also served as a self-critical medium through which to treat themes of nationalism, cultural inheritance, and identity.

Trinidad, historically located at the crossroads of the Americas, has produced an incomparable national literature, fashioning genres that have informed the Caribbean region as a whole. One of the greatest contemporary Trinidadian writers is Earl Lovelace. His novelistic performative epics combine the rhythms of steelband and calypso with the narrative complexity of Faulkner. Lovelace was an early enthusiast for Black Power and remains an indefatigable critic of the inequalities bequeathed by the post-Independence state. Embracing an aesthetic that seeks out the darkness of the nation, the traces of Africa, the passions of the black dispossessed, the liturgies of the Shouter churches, he strives to imagine a society which might at last break free from its colonial past, dramatizing the political and psychic struggles of the poor for selfhood.

George Lamming is one of the best known, certainly one of the most highly regarded contemporary writers from the Caribbean. Spanning nearly 60 years and encompassing fiction, poetry and critical essays, Lamming's writing covers the length and breadth of Caribbean intellectual, cultural, political and literary life. Credited as a part of that group of Caribbean activists who awoke the Caribbean to its identity and more specifically to its cultural identity, his works have focused on finding new political and social identity. Indeed, Lamming was a seminal figure in the Caribbean 20th century intellectual tradition and radical anti-colonial tradition. Lamming is best known for his novels. This much needed reader on Lamming and his work examines the history of the Caribbean and the categories which continue to shape and influence Caribbean identity in our contemporary world.

This book is an attempt to understand Caribbean histories, patterns of migration and race-relations. It is a collection of essays by Caribbean writers like V.S. Naipaul, Paule Marshall, Jean Rhys, Austin Clarke, Caryl Phillips and Cyril Dabydeen. The essays in this book have taken up most of the representative authors of the Caribbean, either by addressing their work or through contributions by the writers themselves. The attempt has been to provide a chronological history of the Caribbean and to give representation to writers living now in different host cultures. Some papers are gender-oriented and locate the position of the women in the West Indies.

Focusing on orally transmitted cultural forms in the Caribbean, this book reaffirms the importance of myth and symbol in folk consciousness as a mode of imaginative conceptualization. Paul A. Griffith cross-references Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott's postcolonial debates with issues at seminal sites where Caribbean imaginary insurgencies took root. This book demonstrates the ways residually oral forms distilled history, society, and culture to cleverly resist aggressions authored through colonialist presumptions. In an analysis of the archetypal patterns in the oral tradition-both literary and nonliterary, this impressive book gives insight into the way in which people think about the world and represent themselves in it.

Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics offers a critical appraisal of C.L.R. James as a major twentieth-century activist-intellectual, exploring his prolific output spanning decades within genres as diverse as history, philosophy, sociology, literary and cultural criticism, prose fiction, and reportage. Assessing James as a lifelong committed Marxist and humanist, the book argues that his core concern with racial, political, and cultural questions as central to human and social understanding led him to develop a distinctive critique of the modern world.