Selected essays from the rich and complex collection of Edouard Glissant, one of the most prominent writers and intellectuals of the Caribbean, examine the psychological, sociological, and philosophical implications of cultural dependency.

A study of the multicultural, multilingual, and Creolized languages that characterize Caribbean discourse, especially as reflected in the language choices that preoccupy creative writers Caribbean Literary Discourse opens the challenging world of language choices and literary experiments characteristic of the multicultural and multilingual Caribbean. In these societies, the language of the master— English in Jamaica and Barbados—overlies the Creole languages of the majority. As literary critics and as creative writers, Barbara Lalla, Jean D’Costa, and Velma Pollard engage historical, linguistic, and literary perspectives to investigate the literature bred by this complex history. They trace the rise of local languages and literatures within the English speaking Caribbean, especially as reflected in the language choices of creative writers. The study engages two problems: first, the historical reality that standard metropolitan English established by British colonialists dominates official economic, cultural, and political affairs in these former colonies, contesting the development of vernacular, Creole, and pidgin dialects even among the region’s indigenous population; and second, the fact that literary discourse developed under such conditions has received scant attention. Caribbean Literary Discourse explores the language choices that preoccupy creative writers in whose work vernacular discourse displays its multiplicity of origins, its elusive boundaries, and its most vexing issues. The authors address the degree to which language choice highlights political loyalties and tensions; the politics of identity, self-representation, and nationalism; the implications of code-switching—the ability to alternate deliberately between different languages, accents, or dialects—for identity in postcolonial society; the rich rhetorical and literary effects enabled by code-switching and the difficulties of acknowledging or teaching those ranges in traditional education systems; the longstanding interplay between oral and scribal culture; and the predominance of intertextuality in postcolonial and diasporic literature.

In this volume, scholars take the debate on Creolisation and its manifestations beyond the discipline of history and into debates on ethnicity, identity, class, the economics and politics of slavery and freedom, language, music, cookery and religion.

In The Haitian Revolution, the Harlem Renaissance, and Caribbean Negritude: Overlapping Discourses of Freedom and Identity, Tammie Jenkins argues that the ideas of freedom and identity cultivated during the Haitian Revolution were reinvigorated in Harlem Renaissance texts and were instrumental in the development of Caribbean Negritude. Jenkins analyzes the precipitating events that contributed to the Haitian Revolution and connects them to Harlem Renaissance publications by Eric D. Walrond and Joel Augustus “J.A.” Rogers. Jenkins traces these movements to Paris where black American expatriates, Harlem Renaissance members, and Francophones from Africa and the Caribbean met once a week at Le Salon Clamart to share their lived experiences with racism, oppression, and disenfranchisement in their home countries. Using these dialogical exchanges, Jenkins investigates how the Haitian Revolution and Harlem Renaissance tenets influence the modernization of Caribbean Negritude's development.

Creole languages are characteristically associated with a negative image. How has this prestige been formed? And is it as static as the diglossic situation in many anglo-creolophone societies seems to suggest? This volume examines socio-historical and epistemological factors in the prestige formation of Caribbean English-Lexicon Creoles and subjects their classification as a (socio)linguistic type to scrutiny and critical debate. In its analysis of rich empirical data this study also demonstrates that the uses, functions and negotiations of Creole within particular social and linguistic practices have shifted considerably. Rather than limiting its scope to one "national" speech community, the discussion focusses on changes of the social meaning of Creole in various discursive fields, such as inter generational changes of Creole use in the London Diaspora, diachronic changes of Creole representation in written texts, and diachronic changes of Creole representation in translation. The study employs a discourse analytical approach drawing on linguistic models as well as Foucauldian theory.

From cross-dressing pirates to servants and slaves, women have played vital and often surprising roles in the navigation and cultural mapping of Caribbean territory. Yet these experiences rarely surface in the increasing body of critical literature on women s travel writing, which has focused on European or American women traveling to exotic locales as imperial subjects. This stellar collection of essays offers a contestatory discourse that embraces the forms of travelogue, autobiography, and ethnography as vehicles for women s rewriting of "flawed" or incomplete accounts of Caribbean cultures. This study considers writing by Caribbean women, such as the slave narrative of Mary Prince and the autobiography of Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole, and works by women whose travels to the Caribbean had enormous impacts on their own lives, such as Aphra Behn and Zora Neale Hurston. Ranging across cultural, historical, literary, and class dimensions of travel writing, these essays give voice to women writers who have been silenced, ignored, or marginalized.