Tradition and the Postcolonial Talent : T.S. Eliot versus Edward Kamau Brathwaite

Author(s):  
Ian Whittington

As a colonial subject and woman of colour, Una Marson occupies a unique place in the history of wartime broadcasting in Britain. Her weekly programCalling the West Indies began as a “message home” program for Caribbean soldiers stationed in the UK but grew, as the war progressed, into a literary and cultural forum for writers from across the Black Atlantic. Though barred from advocating openly for independence, Marson used her program to promote West Indian cultural autonomy by spotlighting emerging Caribbean literary figures and forging connections with activists and intellectuals from the U.S., Britain, Africa, and elsewhere. Beyond building such transatlantic networks, Calling the West Indies afforded listeners in the Caribbean the first opportunities to hear literature spoken in the West Indian forms of English which Edward Kamau Brathwaite would go on to call “nation language.” By focusing on Marson’s wartime work, this chapter rectifies a persistent tendency, in histories of Caribbean literature and broadcasting, to omit not only the central role played by this progressive feminist intellectual, but also the role of the war itself as catalyst to the postwar literary renaissance in the West Indies.


Author(s):  
Jason Allen-Paisant

This chapter considers the reception of Dante in Caribbean literature. It explores the works of two seminal Afro-Caribbean poets, the Barbadian Edward Kamau Brathwaite and the Jamaican Lorna Goodison, examining their relationship to Dante’s Commedia and De vulgari eloquentia. The chapter discusses the import of these two texts and of the figure of Dante in the articulation of Brathwaite’s seminal concept of ‘nation language’ and in Goodison’s theorizations of rhetoric, which highlight the epistemic dimensions of language, particularly in the colonial and postcolonial contexts. The chapter shows how the figure and work of Dante have been instrumental for these two writers in their exploration of the entangled concerns of language, race, and power in the colonial continuum. In so doing, the chapter highlights similarities, while underscoring differences, between Caribbean poets’ engagement with the figure and work of Dante and the reception of the Italian poet among African-American writers.


Author(s):  
William Ghosh

This book presents a new portrait of V.S. Naipaul, one of the twentieth-century’s most controversial writers about colonialism and its aftermath, by looking at his relationship with the Caribbean, the region of his birth. It argues that whilst Naipaul presented himself as a global public intellectual—a citizen of nowhere—his writing and thought was shaped by his Caribbean intellectual formation, and his investment in Caribbean political debates. Focusing on three key forms of Caribbean writing—the novel, the historical narrative, and the travel narrative—it shows how the generic, stylistic, and formal choices of writers had great political significance. Telling the story of his creative and intellectual development at three crucial points in Naipaul’s career, it offers a new intellectual biography of its principal subject. By showing Naipaul’s crucial place in the history of Caribbean ideas, it also provides new perspectives on a number of major writers and thinkers from the region, including C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, Kamau Brathwaite, Sylvia Wynter, George Lamming, Derek Walcott, Maryse Condé, and David Scott.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-42
Author(s):  
Adetunji Adelokun

This paper is an attempt to consider the deployment of literary motifs to discuss the representation of identities in the selected works of Kamau Brathwaite and Helene Johnson. The analysis was informed by the need to identify the adherence to the preponderant theme of the quest for identity and the representation of identities in American Literary tradition. This study critically appraised and analyzed the development of the African-American and Caribbean literary traditions within the conscious space of displacement and identity renegotiation. The study revealed that the selected and critically pieces of the writers amplify the similarity or uniformity in the sociohistorical experiences of displacement from the root, search for identity and reinstatement of lost values in the enabling milieus of the writers.


2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 16-35
Author(s):  
Mark Harris

This essay asks how the soundscapes represented in Caribbean literature and music provide alternative paradigms for conceptualizing noise and silence. As American and European sound studies have drawn from the writings of John Cage, Murray Schafer, and Jacques Attali to articulate alternative practices of listening and soundmaking, they have marginalized black experience. Caribbean noise, formed out of resistance to slavery and colonialism, has been excluded from informing those alternative practices. The depths of sonic experience revealed by soundscapes of Kamau Brathwaite’s poetry and the Mighty Sparrow’s calypsos concern the impact of centuries of Atlantic slavery on black hearing and speaking. They expose the racial and economic determinants of sound studies’ advocacy of indifferent listening and pure sound environments. In contrast, Caribbean histories of resourceful hearing and soundmaking bring distinctive sonic cultures to challenge established listening practices and provide ways of questioning canonical definitions of noise and silence.


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