This essay discusses the novel The Drift Latitudes (2006) by the Anglo-Sudanese author Jamal Mahjoub. By telling the stories of the German refugee Ernst Frager and his two British families, I argue that Mahjoub's novel utilizes the tropes of transnational travel and migration to present a critique of discourses of purity and nationalism. Through its uncovering of silenced family narratives, the novel hybridizes British and European identities and underlines the need to remember the stories of ordinary people omitted from official histories. As the novel's supposedly British families appear to possess transnational links with Sudan, Germany, and the Caribbean, the novel reconstructs European identity as transnational and in need of historical reassessment. As a further contribution to the importance of hybrid identity, the story of black cultural identity and its construction in post-Second World War Liverpool is told in tandem with the importance of black music as a means of constructing black diasporic identity.
All literary categories and definitions are imperfect and are often the sunject of the debate and contestation: "West Indies and The Caribbean" are no exception. 'West Indies', the term used in this journal's previous bibliographies to describe the literature of the Caribbean region, accurately defines the literature of the Commonwealth Caribbean, which is Anglophone and which has historical and contemporary political, social and cultural link to Britain. At the same time, literary scholarsship from the region increasingly identifies itself as Caribbean, that is connected geographically, historically and culturally to the Francophone, Hispanic and Ducth-speaking Caribbean and to the Americas; The Caribbean complied and introduced by Suzanne Scafe London .....Debate and contestation: West Indies' and 'The Caribbean' are no exceptions.
Caribbean lIterary production is being redefined in the wake of recent cahanges in the larger publishing houses that have traditionally published Caribbean literature. Macmillan Caribbean Writers, Launched in 2003 at the Calabash Literary festival in Jamaica, has opened its series with an impressive list of plubblications including new editions of Caribbean fiction from established writers, the Caribbean Classics series, which includes unplublished fiction and autobiograph7y from the nineteeth and early twentieth century, and new writting from as yet unplublished writers. Other very small Caribbean publishers such as Arawak and Twin Guinep continue to plublish reference works and some literary criticism, and the plublications lists of the University of the West Indies Press continues to grow; Introduction to Caribbean literary production.
As this year's list of published works shows, CAribbean literature is expanding in new and exiciting ways, New York from the first generations of canonical writers continues to be fresh and surprising, reflecting diverse literary, cultural and linguistic influences. A growing body of literature from the Caribbean diaspora adds new dimensions to notions of a caribbean identity and literary representations of caribbean time, place and space. The double commonwealth' status of caribbean-canadian literay culture provides a fertile soil in which to reconfigure familiar themes of un/beloging, exile, hybridity and the call of home. As well as reflecting these more generic 'postcolonial' issues, Caribbean literature defines itself within a distincly Caribbean tradition, re-voicing, interrogating.
