Search results for ""Ian Randle Publishers,Jamaica""

Created in the West Indies: Caribbean Perspectives on V.S. Naipaul updates and furthers the debates on the life and work of an internationally acclaimed writer, Nobel laureate and native son of Trinidad and Tobago. The book draws together the proceedings of a series of outstanding public lectures and an academic symposium that featured a distinguished cadre of Caribbean scholars who, during 2007, participated in a year-long schedule of activities initiated by the University of the West Indies, St Augustine campus, to honour the life and work of this highly accomplished `enigma’ of Caribbean letters. The essays in this collection are organised into three sections that represent a compression of the multifaceted range of V.S. Naipaul’s creative concerns, thematic explorations, even obsessions, and philosophical persuasions. The singular power of these contributions is their ability to push at the borders of Naipaul scholarship, cutting new pathways for considering this most intriguing creative mind and offering fresh perspectives on the now familiar themes of postcolonial identity and nationalism, the fiction of history and history of fiction, home and belonging in a world characterised by flux, movement and cultural contact. Controversy has always companioned Naipaul’s career. Not surprisingly, some of the contributions are unrelentingly honest in their exposé of Naipaul for his trademark impatience with the very societies that created his unique sensibility and his propensity for self-contradiction.

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For centuries, the stories of the Transatlantic Trade in Africans has been filtered through the eyes and records of Europeans. In this seminal work, historian Anne C. Bailey focuses on memories of the trade from the African perspective. African chiefs and other elders from the area of the former old slave coast of southeastern Ghana, share stories that reveal that Africans were traders as well as victims of the trade. Bailey argues that like victims of trauma, many African societies now experience a fragmented view of their past that partially explains the blanket of silence and shame around the slave trade. Capturing scores of oral histories handed down through generations of storytellers, Bailey finds that although Africans were not equal partners with Europeans, even their partial involvement in the slave trade had devastating consequences on their history and identity. Bailey breaks the deafening silence and explores the delicate and fragmented nature of historical memory in this unprecedented and revelatory book which is bound to spark discussion and debate.

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