Description
Book SynopsisThis book examines the representation of community in contemporary Anglophone Caribbean short stories, focusing on the most recent wave of Caribbean short story writers following the genre's revival in the mid 1980s. The first extended study of Caribbean short stories, it presents the phenomenon of interconnected stories as a significant feature of late twentieth and early twenty-first century Anglophone Caribbean literary cultures. It contends that the short story collection and cycle, literary forms regarded by genre theorists as necessarily concerned with representations of community, are particularly appropriate and enabling as a vehicle through which to conceptualise Caribbean communities. The book covers short story collections and cycles by Olive Senior, Earl Lovelace, Kwame Dawes, Alecia Mckenzie, Lawrence Scott, Mark Mcwatt, Robert Antoni and Dionne Brand. It argues that the form of interconnected stories is a crucial part of these writers' imagining of communities which may be fractured, plural and fraught with tensions, but which nevertheless hold together. The book takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of community, bringing literary representations of community into dialogue with models of community developed in the field of Caribbean anthropology. The works analysed are set in Trinidad, Jamaica and Guyana, and in several cases the setting extends to the Caribbean diaspora in Europe and North America. Looking in turn at rural, urban, national and global communities, the book draws attention to changing conceptions of community around the turn of the millennium.
Trade ReviewReviews 'Communities is thoroughly researched and well argued throughout. It benefits from extensive fieldwork and interviews with authors and best serves as a primer for students of Caribbean short fiction, and an introduction to Caribbean interdisciplinary studies.'
Janelle Rodriques,
New West Indian Guide'Evans’s analysis shows both tensions and connections between literary and anthropological representations in the examined texts, her discussion of ‘creolization' demonstrates how her selected texts negotiate differences beyond two apparently incompatible positions of either a focus on common values in a unifying society or the play of differences in a plural society.'
Melanie A. Murray,
Journal of Postcolonial WritingTable of Contents
- Introduction
- 1: Rural Communities
- Olive Senior, Earl Lovelace and the short story form
- Village communities in Olive Senior’s Summer Lightning and Other Stories
- From country to city in Earl Lovelace’s A Brief Conversion and Other Stories
- 2: Urban Communities
- Downtown worlds
- Uptown worlds
- Writing Kingston in Kwame Dawes’ A Place to Hide and Other Stories and Alecia McKenzie’s Satellite City and Other Stories
- 3: National Communities
- Fugal voices in Lawrence Scott’s Witchbroom
- The journey upriver in Mark McWatt’s Suspended Sentences: Fictions of Atonement
- 4: Global Communities
- The diasporic family in Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon
- Mobile readerships in Robert Antoni’s My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales
- Conclusion
- Appendices
- I: St Jerome in his Study
- II: At the Full and Change of the Moon family tree
- III: My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales front cover image
- Bibliography
- Index
