Books in the New Caribbean Studies series

This book revisits Jean Rhys's ground-breaking 1966 novel to explore its cultural and artistic influence in the areas of not only literature and literary criticism, but fashion design, visual art, and the theatre as well.

Humor in the Caribbean Literary Canon intimately examines Caribbean writers who engage canonical Western texts and forms, while using humor to challenge Western representations of people of African descent.

This book discusses an archival turn in the work of contemporary Caribbean writers and visual artists across linguistic locations and whose work engages critically with various historical narratives and colonial and postcolonial records.

It examines works by canonical authors - Brathwaite, Lamming, Lovelace, Naipaul, Phillips and Selvon - and by understudied writers - including Agard, Fergus, John, Keens-Douglas, Khan and Markham. Literary depictions of iconic West Indies players - including Constantine, Headley, Worrell, Walcott, Sobers, Richards, and Lara - feature throughout.

This book is the first to analyse how BBC radio presented Anglophone Caribbean literature and in turn aided and influenced the shape of imaginative writing in the region. Part literary history and part literary biography, this study fills a gap in the narrative of the region's literary history.

Bringing together three generations of scholars, thinkers and activists, this book is the first to trace a genealogy of the specific contributions Indo-Caribbean women have made to Caribbean feminist epistemology and knowledge production.

If hunger gives irony purchase by anchoring it in particular historical and material conditions, irony also gives a literature and politics of hunger a means for moving beyond a given situation, for pushing through the inertias of history and culture.

Imagining Motherhood in Contemporary Irish and Caribbean Literature undertakes a comparative transnational reading to develop more expansive literary models of good mothering.

In most Caribbean countries homosexuality is still illegal and many outside of the region are unaware of how difficult life can be for gay men and lesbians. This book collects interviews with queer Caribbean writers, activists, and citizens and challenges the dominance of Euro-American theories in understanding global queerness.

The Grenada Revolution in the Caribbean Present: Operation Urgent Memory is the first scholarly book from the humanities on the subject of the Grenada Revolution and the US intervention.

Telling West Indian Lives: Life Narrative and the Reform of Plantation Slavery Cultures 1804-1834 draws historical and literary attention to life story and narration in the late plantation slavery period. Drawing on new archival research, it highlights the ways written narrative shaped evangelical, philanthropic, and antislavery reform projects.

Focusing on piracy in the seventeenth century, filibustering in the nineteenth century, intracolonial migrations in the 1930s, metropolitan racializations in the 1950s and 1960s, and feminist redefinitions of creolization and sexile from the 1940s to the 1990s, this book redefines the Caribbean beyond the postcolonial debate.

Relations between women - like the branches and roots of the mangrove - twist around, across, and within others as they pervade Caribbean letters. Desire between Women in Caribbean Literature elucidates the place of desire between women in Caribbean letters, compelling readers to rethink how to read the structures and practices of sexuality.

Reflecting on the relationship between memory, power, and national identity, this book examines the complex reactions of the people of the Caribbean to the 500th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of the New World. Viala analyzes the ways in which Columbus became a reservoir of metaphors to confront anxieties of the present with myths of the past.

In 1898, both Cuba and the Philippines achieved their independence from Spain and then immediately became targets of US expansionism. This book presents a comparative analysis of late-nineteenth-century literature and history in Cuba and the Philippines, focusing on the writings of Jose Marti and Jose Rizal to reveal shared anti-imperial struggles.

This book provides a much-needed study of the lived experience of militarization in the Caribbean from 1914 to the present. Rather than opposing or defending militarization per se, this book focuses attention on how Caribbean people negotiate militarization in their everyday lives.

The Caribbean has traditionally been understood as a region that did not develop a significant 'native' literary culture until the postcolonial period. However, as recent research has shown, although the printing press did not arrive in the Caribbean until 1718, the roots of Caribbean literary history predate its arrival.

Through an examination of intimate relationships within indenture narratives, this text traces the seductive hierarchies of empire - the oppressive ideologies of gender, ethnicity, and class that developed under imperialism and indenture and that continue to impact the Caribbean today.

This book revisits Jean Rhys's ground-breaking 1966 novel to explore its cultural and artistic influence in the areas of not only literature and literary criticism, but fashion design, visual art, and the theatre as well.

This book explores the humanities as an insightful platform for understanding and responding to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, other manifestations of "Guantanamo," and the contested place of freedom in American Empire.

Through an examination of intimate relationships within indenture narratives, this text traces the seductive hierarchies of empire - the oppressive ideologies of gender, ethnicity, and class that developed under imperialism and indenture and that continue to impact the Caribbean today.

This collection takes as its starting point the ubiquitous representation of various forms of mental illness, breakdown and psychopathology in Caribbean writing, and the fact that this topic has been relatively neglected in criticism, especially in Anglophone texts, apart from the scholarship devoted to Jean Rhys¿s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). The contributions to this volume demonstrate that much remains to be done in rethinking the trope of ¿madness¿ across Caribbean literature by local and diaspora writers. This book asks how focusing on literary manifestations of apparent mental aberration can extend our understanding of Caribbean narrative and culture, and can help us to interrogate the norms that have been used to categorize art from the region, as well as the boundaries between notions of rationality, transcendence and insanity across cultures.

This book is a manifesto-like consideration of the potentialities of radical political thought and action in contemporary Puerto Rico.

The Caribbean has traditionally been understood as a region that did not develop a significant 'native' literary culture until the postcolonial period. However, as recent research has shown, although the printing press did not arrive in the Caribbean until 1718, the roots of Caribbean literary history predate its arrival.

Bringing together three generations of scholars, thinkers and activists, this book is the first to trace a genealogy of the specific contributions Indo-Caribbean women have made to Caribbean feminist epistemology and knowledge production.

This book provides a much-needed study of the lived experience of militarization in the Caribbean from 1914 to the present. Rather than opposing or defending militarization per se, this book focuses attention on how Caribbean people negotiate militarization in their everyday lives.

This book explores the humanities as an insightful platform for understanding and responding to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, other manifestations of "Guantanamo," and the contested place of freedom in American Empire.

Rhys Matters, the first collection of essays focusing on Rhys's writing in over twenty years, encounters her oeuvre from multiple disciplinary perspectives and appreciates the interventions in modernism, postcolonial studies, Caribbean studies, and women's and gender studies.