A groundbreaking novel in Caribbean literature and winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Novel from the acclaimed Trinidadian writer. A mysterious child, half-human, half-frog, is born on the island of Corpus Christi in the West Indies. Its mother becomes Magdalena Divina, patron saint of the island, worshipped by Hindu and Muslim Caste Indians, Africans, Catholics, and indigenous Indians alike. The frogchild, allegedly drowned in a pot of callaloo by the wife of the man who sired it, becomes the focus of an evolving legend as Johnny Domingo hears this story about his family from different people and tries, impossibly, to piece it together into one coherent and true account. “This is magical realism with an avant-garde twist, as if Garcia M[á]rquez and Joyce had themselves engaged in unholy cohabitation.” —The Washington Post Book World Praise for Robert Antoni “Robert Antoni is a treasure of our literary culture.” —Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize–winning author “Robert Antoni doesn’t make giant steps. He makes quantum—and sometimes hilarious—leaps past whatever we called metafiction to the same territory as Richard Powers and David Foster Wallace. But like those men and unlike nearly everybody else, he never forgets that at the core of it all you’ve still got to tell a rip-roaring story.” —Marlon James, New York Times–bestselling author

This text offers a critical perspective on fiction from the West Indies. The writers are from diverse backgrounds with differing artistic perspectives, but share a commitment to a repossession of Caribbean life and consciousness. The writers are Senior, Edgell, Phillips, Naipul, and Antoni.

Deconstructs the field of postcolonial studies.

Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze maps a new intellectual and literary history of postcolonial Caribbean writing and thought spanning from the 1930s surrealist movement to the present, crossing the region's language blocs, and focused on the interconnected principles of creativity and commemoration. Exploring the work of René Ménil, Édouard Glissant, Wilson Harris, Derek Walcott, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Pauline Melville, Robert Antoni and Nalo Hopkinson, this study reveals the explicit and implicit engagement with Deleuzian thought at work in contemporary Caribbean writing. Uniting for the first time two major schools of contemporary thought - postcolonialism and post-continental philosophy - this study establishes a new and innovative critical discourse for Caribbean studies and postcolonial theory beyond the oppositional dialectic of colonizer and colonized. Drawing from Deleuze's writings on Bergson, Nietzsche and Spinoza, this study interrogates the postcolonial tropes of newness, becoming, relationality and a philosophical concept of immanence that lie at the heart of a little-observed dialogue between contemporary Caribbean writers and Deleuze.

An academic book is much more than paper and ink, pixels and electrons. A dynamic social network of authors, editors, typesetters, proofreaders, indexers, printers, and marketers must work together to turn a manuscript into a book. Editors, Scholars, and the Social Text explores the theories and practices of editing, the processes of production and reproduction, and the relationships between authors and texts, as well as manuscripts and books. By bringing together academic experts and experienced practitioners, including editorial specialists, scholarly publishing professionals, and designers, Editors, Scholars, and the Social Text offers indispensable insight into the past and future of academic communication.

Why did the novel take such a long time to emerge in the colonial world? And, what cultural work did it come to perform in societies where subjects were not free and modes of social organization diverged from the European cultural centers where the novel gained its form and audience? Answering these questions and more, Volume 11, The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean since 1950 explores the institutions of cultural production that exerted influence in late colonialism, from missionary schools and metropolitan publishers to universities and small presses. How these structures provoke and respond to the literary trends and social peculiarities of Africa and the Caribbean impacts not only the writing and reading of novels in those regions, but also has a transformative effect on the novel as a global phenomenon. Together, the volume's 32 contributing experts tell a story about the close relationship between the novel and the project of decolonization, and explore the multiple ways in which novels enable readers to imagine communities beyond their own and thus made this form of literature a compelling catalyst for cultural transformation. The authors show that, even as the novel grows in Africa and the Caribbean as a mark of the elites' mastery of European form, it becomes the essential instrument for critiquing colonialism and for articulating the new horizons of cultural nationalism. Within this historical context, the volume examines works by authors such as Chinua Achebe, Nadine Gordimer, George Lamming, Jamaica Kincaid, V.S. Naipaul, Zoe Wicomb, J. M. Coetzee, and many others.