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This interdisciplinary study examines the cultural and historical significance of the Jamaican Anansi folktales.

Anansi the spider is the trickster folk hero West African slaves transported to the Caribbean, who symbolises key aspects of Afro-Caribbean culture and is celebrated as a vital link with an African past. Anansi stories, in which the small spider turns the tables on his powerful enemies through cunning and trickery, are now told and published worldwide.

Anansi survived a cultural metamorphosis and came to symbolise the resistance of the Jamaican people. This original book examines Anansis roots in Ghana, details the changes Anansi underwent during the Middle Passage and his potential for inspiring tactics of resistance in a plantation context, and analyses Anansis role in postcolonial Jamaica, illustrating how he is interpreted as a symbol of individualism and celebrated as an emblem of resistance.

With its broad historical sweep, tracing Anansi from Ghana through to his contested position in contemporary Jamaica, this book makes an important contribution to the ongoing debate about whether the slave trade transmitted or destroyed the culture of the enslaved.

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By adopting a Caribbean perspective through which to re-examine seventeenth- to nineteenth-century texts from the British canon, this collection of essays uncovers the ways in which the literature produced at the height of British imperialism was used to consolidate and validate the national identity of the colonizer, and to justify political and cultural domination of Other places like the Caribbean.

The contributors critique a wide range of verse and prose from the works of Shakespeare, Donne, Defoe, Austen, Brontë, Froude, Kingsley, Trollope, Jenkins, Stevenson, Barrie, Carroll and Dickens, revealing a literature that was very much a product of its time, but that was also responsible for contemporary and later conceptions of the Caribbean and other outposts of empire. While the critics in this volume demonstrate how such texts constructed and perpetuated the fact of superior British culture and civilization, they also apply to their literary interpretation a Caribbean experience of challenges associated with nation-building and identity formation. The contributors examine English literary excursions into nationhood, self-definition, freedom and confinement, and engagements with the Other  the very issues through which the Caribbean has grown into being.

In revealing the complex but familiar insecurities and challenges through which English literature evolved to canonicity, Postscripts follows Barbara Lallas Postcolonialisms, which offered Caribbean re-readings of English medieval verse. Like that earlier study, Postscripts addresses both scholars of English literature and literary history, and those of Caribbean and postcolonial studies, and speaks to a wide readership that spans cultures sharing a colonized or colonizing past.

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This contribution to the study and analysis of Caribbean politics explores the political culture of the Caribbean in order to understand the regional differences. The contributors, renowned internationally for their expertise in Caribbean studies, explore the topic from their varied cultural experiences and offer a new dimension to the study of political culture.

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A promise to return to a place that has changed you, where youve lived and loved with the intensity and passion of youth, is often made but rarely kept. This provocative memoir begins with such a promise, made in 1962 by three young American women  the author among them  on a windy mountaintop overlooking the Caribbean Sea. Using tools of the historian, novelist and poet to share memories of her experiences and emotional journey, Gail Porter Mandell offers an unaccustomed perspective on Belize in the waning days of colonial rule, with political and cultural revolutions brewing.

Seen through eyes opened wide, the seaside town of Angel Creek and its diverse cast of characters  Garifuna, Creole, Latino, Amerindian, Asian, European and American  come alive. Years later, a surprise-filled return journey affirms that human relationships can transcend racial and cultural differences  and even time.

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In The Child and the Caribbean Imagination, twelve emerging and established scholars in the fields of literature, linguistics and education examine and interrogate the representations, roles and realities of Caribbean children. This multidisciplinary volume explores the experiential, discursive and fictive worlds of the child portrayed and treated variously as subject and object in the regions oral and scribal literatures, formal classroom settings, and other socio-cultural contexts. Divided into four sections  Discourse and Representation, Unstable Identities, Language Development, and Pedagogy  The Child and the Caribbean Imagination offers breadth and depth in its contribution to much-needed academic scholarship aimed at impacting the lives of and paying homage to children in the Caribbean.