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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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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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Indo-Caribbean women writers are virtually invisible in the literary landscape because of cultural and social inhibitions and literary chauvinism. Until recently, the richness and particularities of the experiences of these writers in the field of literature and literary studies were compromised by stereotypical representations of the Indo-Caribbean women that were narrated from a purely masculine or an Afrocentric point of view. This book fills an important gap in an important but underestimated emergent field. The book explores how cultural traditions and female modes of opposition to patriarchal control were transplanted from India and rearticulated in the Indo-Caribbean diaspora to determine whether the idea of ""cultural continuity"" is, in fact, a postcolonial reality or a fictionalized myth. The Indian women who braved the treacherous crossing of the Atlantic, or the kala pani, to Trinidad and Guyana provided courage, determination, self-reliance and sexual independence to their literary granddaughters who in turn used the kala pani as the necessary language and frame of reference to position Indo-Caribbean female subjectivity with equating writing as a pubic declaration of one's identity and right to claim creative agency. The book is of critical interest to those interested in twentieth-century literary studies, Caribbean studies, gender studies, ethnic studies and cultural studies.

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The re-publication of Lionheart Gal marks an event unique in contemporary literature. It is the distillation of the Jamaican womans experience in fifteen compelling life stories from the internationally known Sistren Theatre Collective.

Since 1977 the women of Sistren have been exploring the lives of Caribbean women, from which they create plays, workshops and screen prints for presentation throughout the Caribbean and elsewhere. This book is based on testimonies from Sistren collected and edited by Honor Ford-Smith into a vivid record of womens lives. The stories retain all the emotional depth of works of the imagination; yet they are at the same time invaluable records of oral history. Scholars of language, culture, politics and literature will need this book; the general reader will revel in it.

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Employing critical analysis of Caribbean intellectual thought and of the postcolonial political economy, Brian Meeks sets about proposing a manifesto for the future. What emerges is a programme for the medium term, which is pragmatic in its efforts to deal with the current crisis without engaging in the romanticism of an all-encompassing revolutionary transformation. Meeks suggests a form of participatory reorganization without, necessarily, dismantling the fundamentals of formal democratic organization. Particular emphasis is placed on rural agro-producers because their empowerment, politically and economically, resolves the problem of elite domination while creating the conditions for economic democracy. He argues, finally, that the proposals can become the basis for a more fundamental social and intellectual transformation from, following Sylvia Wynter, ""man"" to ""human"", based on democracy, community and solidarity.

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Rock it Come Over describes the music and lore of slavery from the early sixteenth century through emancipation in 1838 to the mid twentieth century. Lewin explores the role of music in the lives of the slaves as a method of communication, as a form of resistance and subversion, as a repository of oral history and beliefs, and, ultimately, as a means of survival. The work is based on decades of research into the music sung and played by the working people of Jamaica. Lewin relates the music to traditions that preserve an African way of life, such as Revivalism and its strong heritage of faith and worship. She has a special interest in the Kumina cult and describes in detail the life and beliefs of Kumina queen, Imogene 'Queenie' Kennedy. Rock it Come Over is the most extensive study of Jamaican folk music yet published. It is also an examination of the roots of that music and a record of the folk heritage that is, in spite of many efforts, rapidly retreating before the pressures of life today.