Post-Colonial “Writing Back”

The main aim of this article is to outline the state of the art of contemporary post-colonial literature related to the names of Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, Theodore Wilson Harris, Amos Tutuola, Grace Nichols, Amryl Johnson, Fred D’Aguiar, Maryse Conde. The theory of post-colonial studies put forward by Franz Fanon is considered to account for the creation of a new type of a post-colonial writer who maintains his own identity and is not related to any stereotypes, being in a way a Gorgon face that freezes anyone who wants to apply European or North Atlantic views on it. This sort of literature largely breaks the rules of the English language in the case of Anglophone literary sources that are considered in this research. A tendency is to develop a new kind of narrative regarding historical novel as well as classical post-colonial literature in the face of S. Rushdie or Garcia Marquez.

Windrush

‘Windrush’ is a term used to describe the post-World War II generation of writers from the English-speaking Caribbean who were published (and most often lived) in Great Britain. Although generally associated with postcolonial or Caribbean literary studies, many of these writers—including authors such as Wilson Harris, George Lamming, and Samuel Selvon—were seen by their contemporaries as inheritors of the tradition of modernism. Adapting the formally experimental tendencies of pre-war modernism to anti-colonial critique, members of the Windrush generation were widely celebrated in the British literary world as a vibrant new group of writers along the lines of James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. Pioneering figures in the emergence of Anglophone Caribbean literature, they also represent a lesser-known strain of late modernism, one that seized on the unruly, oppositional, and utopian energies characteristic of modernist writing and focused them more firmly on issues of race, ethnicity, and empire.

The Tropical-Urban Imagination: Ancestral Presences in Caribbean Literature

This paper examines certain choices that Caribbean-born women make in forming and or rejecting connections to various foreign communities. Migration is examined as a stimulus to creative vision. By analyzing the literary evocations of Caribbean women’s struggle with issues of displacement, refusal and their desire to find a place of their own, this paper explores the psycho-social impacts of empire and exile on black female bodies. In the selected narratives, there is the possibility for liberation that is afforded through a spatialization of memory, which bears the potential to confront and exorcise buried hurts and anxieties. As such, specific focus is given to the correlation between material and spirit dimensions in Erna Brodber’s novel, Myal (1988) and Patricia Powell’s short-story, “Travelling” (2015). The inquiry demonstrates how a return to timeless and all-pervasive ancestral presences may lead to an awakening from spiritual paralysis of essentialist and material ideologies. Moreover, the project scrutinizes how a comingling of carnal and divine realms influences woman’s quality to forgive. This pursuit is achieved through a methodological approach of qualitative content analysis. Fittingly, it draws on mythic notions of time and collective memory, as espoused by Wilson Harris in The Womb of Space.