"Any attempt to trace the many resonances that historically have been attached to the creole figure in Caribbean literature and culture will be inflected by the long and pervading presence of colonialism in the region and its attendant corollary of hierarchical social separation and difference based on perceptions of race. Indeed, the ambivalent desire and subjective misrecognition that lay at the heart of historical writing about colonialism and racism have tended to frame the issues of monstrosity and exclusion that produced the creole as part and parcel of wider colonial discourses. Thus, the shifting and increasingly unstable inscription of the creole figure echoes, in a certain sense, certain critical ambiguities of politics and temporality that color the colonial encounter and its aftermath. Specifically, in the contemporary English- and French-speaking Caribbean, the multiplicity, displacement, and creative instability that undergird creole-driven theories of postcolonial performance have supplanted this category's suspect beginnings as colonialism's model for the fearfully unnameable and unplaceable hybrid monstrosity, and now increasingly shape the substance of much of the artistic and creative work emerging from the region." --The Author
A literary criticism is presented on the books "Land of the Living," by John Hearne and "Mr. Potter," by Jamaica Kincaid. Particular focus is given to the portrayal of Jewish Holocaust refugees to the Caribbean Area within the aforementioned Caribbean literature, including the relationship between Jews and black Caribbean people.
In this essay Glenn A. Elmer Griffin adopts a January 2009 parricidal attack in St. Lucia as an instantiation of the escalating problem of fratricidal crime in the postcolonial Eastern Caribbean. Following the work of Kamau Brathwaite, Griffin argues that this violence constitutes the nonarrival of postcoloniality as it is anticipated by Frantz Fanon's periodization of fraternal violence. The familial murder embodies an unbroken period of self-killing that warrants a critical reexamination of the provisions of our postcoloniality and the terms of West Indian identity formation.
The article critiques several poems by African American poet of the Harlem Renaissance Langston Hughes, including "Ballad of Margie Polite," "Broadcast to the West Indies" and "Good Morning." Hughes' depiction of transnational solidarity between African Americans of Harlem, New York City, New York and blacks of the West Indies, including his use of an imaginary radio broadcast to portray this theme in the poem "Broadcast to the West Indies," is discussed.
An essay is presented on the relationship between black U.S. feminist literature celebrating author Zora Neale Hurston and U.S.-Caribbean cultural linkages, and the U.S. invasion of the Caribbean during the 1980s. According to the author, black feminists' attempts to reclaim the Caribbean through Hurston contributed to a neoliberal vision of the Caribbean which excluded Grenadian revolutionaries. Grenadian government debt and depictions of the Caribbean in popular culture are discussed.
