Reimagining Caribbean Time and Space: Speculative Fiction

peer reviewe

The Caribbean and Britain

Although characterized by generational shifts in terms of articulating cultural affiliations and attachments to both the Caribbean and Britain, Caribbean British writing remains deeply marked by issues of un/belonging. This essay explores this embedded thematic across changing political contexts and reads the transitions in Caribbean British literature that have brought different revisionary perspectives on literary forms and languages, post-Windrush British history and the much deeper historical connections between the Caribbean presence and the UK. As well as contesting racism, these works articulate intersectional identities informed by class, gender and sexuality as it is experienced within and across the UK and the Caribbean. Given that contemporary Caribbean British literature is very much connected with Caribbean literature and that of the larger diaspora, this essay considers the modes of critical attention necessary to engage with its new forms and platforms

Life writing, gender and Caribbean narrative 1970-2015: itinerant self-making in the postcolonial Caribbean

This chapter argues that contemporary Caribbean women exploit the malleability of life-writing as a genre in a variety of ways that recognize the precariousness of life-making and self-making in the post-plantation Caribbean. While each of the writers discussed here critically refashions life-narrative for their own distinct purposes, they frequently share an interest in filtering personal life experiences through familiar familial and regional histories to emphasize the imbrication of the personal and political. Narrating life-stories is presented in these texts as inextricably linked to the difficult cultural politics of self-making that is so powerfully evidenced from The History of Mary Prince through to the present. While life-writing remains haunted by the region’s violent history, Caribbean women writers continue to excavate that history in order to record, affirm, rescue, restore and celebrate self and life-making possibilities, however fragmented, precarious or itinerant

Digital Yards: Caribbean Writing on Social Media and Other Digital Platforms

The globalizing and interconnecting effects of technology in the twenty-first century have had a crucial impact on the development of Caribbean literary culture and the reconfiguration of its audiences. Caribbean writing and literary criticism are reaching wider audiences within the region and beyond via myriad digital platforms. Through social media, blogs, online journals, digital archives and the websites of publishing houses and festivals, the news and content of Caribbean literary work has become more accessible. Examining networks of ‘digital yards’, a concept built on Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s work, this essay surveys twenty-first century forms of digital Caribbean literary production while considering the continuities that remain between earlier forms of representation and Caribbean literary culture online today