Comparative Examination of Motifs and the Representation of Identies in Selected Works of Kamau Brathwaite and Helene Johnson

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.

Alternative Soundscape Paradigms from Kamau Brathwaite and the Mighty Sparrow

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.

Human Geography and Islands

Work on islands has long played a critical role in the development of many academic disciplines that overlap and are intimately connected with the discipline of geography. Islands were central to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and have subsequently been for the development of ecological, sustainability, and resilience approaches that are prevalent in geography in the 2020s. Islanders were the focal points for Margaret Mead’s and Marylin Strathern’s developments of the discipline of anthropology, concerns for Indigenous geographies, and the counterpositioning of nonmodern reasoning to European or Western frameworks of reasoning. Islands and islanders have also long been a key focus for many who have critiqued the forces of colonialism, such as Édouard Glissant, Kamau Brathwaite, Sylvia Wynter, and Derek Walcott, whose work is extremely influential for Critical Black Geographies. More recently, engaging islands and islanders shaped Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s and Epeli Hau‘ofa’s influential reappraisal of how academic research itself can and should do better, reorienting toward more geographically appropriate Indigenous perspectives. What this is already telling us is that any bibliography compiled under the title of “Geography and Islands” needs to work beyond the boundaries of neatly defined academic disciplines. The focus is the geographical form, the island, and associated island cultures, and thus geographers who study islands regularly step outside fixed disciplines. Thus, this article presents a range of references that are categorized by way of key early-21st-century island themes and topics that will be of particular concern to geographers. Here, the decades since the late 20th century have seen the rise of a more distinct or focused field of academic inquiry, which has come to be known as “island studies.” The key characteristics of this field are its diversity, interdisciplinarity, openness, and extremely rapid growth—geographically, intellectually, and in the broad range of topics and subjects being engaged with in the 2020s. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, the term “island studies” did not have much purchase. In the 2020s, due to the strong repositioning of islands within broader concerns—such as human-nature relations, current developments in environmental and resilience approaches, the ongoing legacies and effects of colonialism, Indigenous geographies, migration patterns, mobilities and movements of humans and nonhumans, geopolitical tensions and strategies, and the Anthropocene, as just some examples—the figure of the island has moved considerably more to the center of many debates (and particularly those debates that concern geographers). This article therefore also reflects the sense of dynamism, as well as the interdisciplinary nature, of work with islands as an exponentially developing field of research.

Storiation: Holding the World

In Chapter 5, the authors give shape to an approach called Storiation. Central to Storiation is registering the ongoing afterlives, hauntings and effects of such significant forces as colonialism, modernity, global warming, nuclear radiation, rising sea levels, and waste production; where islands and island cultures regularly emerge as important sites for investigation. What distinguishes the Storiation analytic is the holding together of entities and effects, registered through islands and islander lives, intra-actions and effects. For authors like Timothy Morton the (island) future then becomes entangled with the past as the ‘afterlife’ of relational effects continue to reverberate in ‘strange’, ‘weird’ or ‘quantum’ ways. The chapter examines how the analytic of Storiation is today being widely developed in Anthropocene philosophy, critical Black and Indigenous Studies which all increasing turn to engage islands as key sites of relational entanglements and associated island scholars and literatures. Of particular importance is the work of the Barbadian writer Kamau Brathwaite. Brathwaite’s onto-epistemology of ‘tidalectics’ profoundly disrupts mainland, continental and modern frameworks of space-time, and binaries of human/nature. In Tiffany Lethabo King’s Storiations of Black and Indigenous life, she employs such methods as ‘critical fabulation’ and ‘speculative bricolage’ in order to hold together the traces, ghosts and afterlives of colonialism embodied and constitutive of the present. Thus, the chapter charts Storiations of the differentiating powers of colonialism, of the emergence of tidalectic psychologies living on in the wake, of island dances, Vodou loa and shamanistic practices, of species long extinct, of the consumerisms that haunt islands in strange ways.

Dante in Caribbean Poetics: Language, Power, Race

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.

Tribute to Kamau Brathwaite (May 11, 1930 to February 4, 2020)

A tribute to the life and works of Kamau Brathwaite , a prominant Caribbean poet and scholar born and raised in Barbados, by close friend Dr.Timothy Reiss.