Independent Publishing: Making and Preserving Culture in a Global Literary Marketplace

First paragraph: This report results from a Programme of Enquiry funded and hosted by the Scottish Insight Universities Institute (Scottish Insight), on the theme of Independent Publishing: Making and Preserving Culture in a Global Literary Marketplace. A series of events was held from June-August 2011 in Scottish Insight's premises in Glasgow, with an additional event held at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in association with Publishing Scotland in August 2011. The events brought together publishers, authors, policy makers, government, librarians, academics from multidisciplinary backgrounds, publishing students, and others with an involvement in books and publishing from Scotland, the UK and beyond. The Programme was supplemented by a series of interviews with independent publishers

Seeing With Other Eyes: Reflections on Christian Proselytization in Indo- Caribbean Fiction

There is a marked contrast between historical and sociological constructs of the religious experience of Indians in the Caribbean and its portrayal in fiction. The historical evidence is that whilst there have been major changes away from the cultural practices and world view that Hindus and Muslims brought with them as indentured labourers to the Caribbean, a majority of Indians in Trinidad and Guyana adhere in some way to the rites, beliefs and values of Hinduism and Islam. Even today, despite determined Christian proselytization and the material advantages which conversion offered in the past, less than twenty percent of Indians are Christians. Hindus and Muslims worry about the state of their religions and the Pundits and Mulvis complain about the increasing secularization of their flocks, but it is clear that being a Hindu or Muslim is central to many Indians\u27 personal identity and to the survival of Indo- Caribbeans as a distinct cultural group. Though Indian attitudes to Christianity and converts are by no means uniform, in general they have tended to be relaxed. There was gratitude for the role of the Christian missions in championing Indian education in the past, though resentment and active opposition to aggressive attempts at conversion. Those Christian Indians who became socially prominent aroused a mixture of pride and envy, pity and contempt for \u27abandoning\u27 their own culture. In the past, popular Hinduism borrowed and absorbed elements of Christianity (just as Indian Presbyterianism became progressively rehinduised); in the present one senses a measure of ecumenical indifference

Literature and cultural pluralism : East Indians in the Caribbean

This study explores the position, of imaginative literature in the ethnically plural societies of Trinidad and Guyana in the Caribbean. It examines the extent to which the production of imaginative literature has been marked by the same ethnic divisions which have bedevilled the political, social and cultural life of these societies. For reasons explained in Chapter One, the study focuses mainly on the literature by writers from and about the Indian section of the population. However, the study is concerned not only with the way that the context of ethnic and cultural fragmentation has affected a good deal of the writing produced in these societies, but also with the smaller number of works, mainly of fiction, which contribute to a much-needed understanding of these societies by bringing the lives of both major groups into a common focus. I argue that it is not enough to describe the differences between the two types of writing merely in terms of the presence or absence of ethnocentric biases, and discuss both the conceptual frameworks within which works of fiction may be felt to give'truthfullknowledge and the conventions of representation which most effectively communicate that knowledge to the reader. The thesis is divided into four sections. The first develops the argument that in much of the fiction examined there has been a connexion between ethnocentric biases, an empiricist epistemology and conventions of representation which are defined later as naturalistic. Parts Two and Three present a detailed examination of this proposition by analysing the works of Indian and non-Indian authors. The fourth part discusses those novels which go beyond the presentation of ethnically fragmented images by constructing fictive worlds which attempt to encompass the social whole. Such novels are shown to have a self-awareness of their epistemological and cultural assumptions, and in some cases an awareness that the real but hidden structures of society may only be incompletely or falsely experienced by the novel's characters. I show that such concerns with attempting to portray the real social whole, frequently intersect with an intense involvement, on the part of the author, with the aesthetic structuring and verbal texture of the novel