This work describes cleavages of race, class and caste in the colonial Jamaican company. It tackles the question of the relation between race and culture.
Simpson discusses the rise in West Indian literature, especially addressing the increase in critical interest from the rest of the world for the abundance of West Indian short story collections that have appeared within the last two decades. The decades of the 1940s and 1950s are examined as the Golden Age of West Indian short stories, and compared to the single author collections that are now supported through popular sales.;
Birbalsingh discusses Indo-Caribbean culture, and the origins and influences of Indo-Caribbean short stories, beginning with the marriage of Indian and African oral traditions. Several authors from throughout Indo-CAribbean literature are profiled, including A. R. F. Webber, V. S. Naipaul, and Samuel Selvon.;
Analyzes the prominent role played by first wave feminism and by women writers between 1898-1903 as the Jamaica Times articulated a broad-based, middle class nationalism and launched a campaign to establish a Jamaican national literature. This archival material is significant because it suggests a significant modification of anglophone Caribbean feminist, literary and nationalist historiography: first wave feminism was not introduced to Jamaica exclusively through black nationalist organizations in the late 19th and early 20th century, but emerged in a broader phenomenon of respectable, middle class nationalism encompassing Jamaican nationalism and Pan Africanism.
