The Caribbean

Introduction

Trinidadian author Celeste Mohammed was awarded the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean literature for her 2021 debut novel Pleasantview. This novel, formed from a number of interconnected Trinidad-set short stories, was shortlisted alongside Jason Allen-Paisant’s poetry compilation Thinking with Trees and Kei Miller’s celebrated collection of essays Things I Have Withheld. Bridget Brereton and Lise Winer co-edited Two Nineteenth-Century Plays from Trinidad, a publication through which they revisit the titular plays written, respectively, from 1832 and 1852–3 by E. L. Joseph and G. N. Dessources. These publications, together with Opal Palmer Adisa’s 100+ Voices of Miss Lou, a collection of poetry, essays and interviews, highlight the continuing diversity to be found in contemporary Caribbean literary production.

The Jamaica Reader: History, Culture, Politics, co-edited by Diana Paton and Matthew J. Smith, is a useful research reference for any academic studying Jamaica and its diaspora. Whilst primarily focused on historical issues, this anthology offers an insight into the artistic and cultural influences of significant Jamaicans such as Miss Lou and Bob Marley. Similarly, The Other Windrush, edited by Maria del Pilar Kaladeen and David Dabydeen, is an eye-opening selection of essays, articles and poems responding to the 2018 Windrush Scandal. Here, the writers who contributed to these anthologies reflect on Caribbean past and present and the different migratory waves that have shaped contemporary Caribbean identity.

Caribbean women’s writing is the focus of a number of scholarly publications. Kaiama L. Glover’s A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being explores female protagonists in works by Maryse Condé, Marlon James and Jamaica Kincaid to analyse gender identity and gender expectations. In The Pen and the Pan: Food, Fiction and Homegrown Caribbean Feminism(s), Robyn Cope examines gender sensitivity and specificity in contemporary Caribbean fiction’s food imagery, offering a comparative study of writings by Guadeloupeans Maryse Condé and Gisèle Pineau, Haitian Edwidge Danticat and Trinidadians Lakshmi Persaud and Shani Mootoo.

Caribbean-British author Caryl Phillips’ fiction was the focus of several scholarly articles published in 2021. They explore Caribbean history, cultural hybridity, the representation of agency and characters who find themselves in precarious situations in his most famous texts, such as The Nature of Blood (1997) or The Lost Child (2015). David Chariandy’s novels Soucouyant: A Novel of Forgetting (2007) and Brother (2017) also received considerable attention last year. Several articles about the Canadian-Caribbean author analysed the postcolonial history and memory in his fiction whilst others compare his work to that by other diasporic authors, including Canadian-Caribbean author Shani Mootoo.

Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism brought out two special issues in the year under review: 25(1), devoted to Caribbean intellectual history and including essays by philosopher Aimé Césaire, visual artist Josef Nassy and author Peter Abrahams, and 25(3), exploring Kamau Brathwaite’s poetry. 2021 also saw the launch of a new scholarly journal, Journal of Indentureship and Its Legacies.