“The Seed of Possible Future(s)” in Our Ongoing Past

Given our critical imperative to break from colonial knowledge systems and world-making practices, the potentialities of Caribbean epistemological and methodological intervention are perhaps the best reasons for scholars, in and beyond the field of Caribbean studies, to engage the impressively expansive three-volume series Caribbean Literature in Transition. Divided chronologically, each volume houses more than twenty essays organized under four central and shared themes of transition that extend critical horizons: literary and generic transitions, cultural and political transitions, the Caribbean regions in transition, and critical transitions. Redefining the region’s literary traditions by tracing the pluralities, multiplicities, and complexities of literary, cultural, geopolitical, and critical transformations that emerge in Caribbean literature from the 1800s to the 2020s, the critical interventions comprising this series present alternative frameworks for future scholarship in part by urging readers to rethink the histories, narratives, categories, and conceptualizations of both literature and the Caribbean. 

The first volume, Caribbean in Transition: 1800–1920, works to “rethink” the categories of early Caribbean literature through a collection of essays that “move back and forth easily between time periods, linking texts, writers, and literary movements together in ways that far exceed traditional notions of literary influence and canon formation” (introduction, 2). Employing a range of literary, cultural, and historical analyses, the volume, edited by Evelyn O’Callaghan and Tim Watson, offers a comprehensive survey of early Caribbean literature that remains attentive to the diversity, hybridity, and heterogeneity of the Caribbean, in part by critically engaging the colonial archive to ground the volume in the “connections that link people and texts across the ostensible divides of empire, language, and geography” (3).

A critical investment in narrative throughout “emphasize[s] the unstable nature of genre categories” by calling attention to the heterogeneity of Caribbean literary texts (5). Exploring the colonial myth of Indigenous absence in seventeenth-to-nineteenth-century British conquest narratives, Kelly Wisecup investigates the rhetorical and political function of intertextuality in representing conquest through the “obscured fact of Indigenous survival” (“Conquest Narratives,” 18). From a “definitive statement” to a “strategic narrative of seeing and not seeing that often served colonial interests” (29), Wisecup destabilizes the myth of Indigenous absence by exposing how it hinges upon the paradoxically “strategic recognition of Indigenous people’s ongoing presence” (19). Not only revealing how colonial story-making practices are shaped by Indigenous presence in the early Caribbean, Wisecup also contributes to the volume’s broader project of rethinking colonial histories, by both drawing out the ways in which people, land, and knowledge are “altered by encounter” (23) under “colonial structures [that] continue to shape representations of the Caribbean” today (27).

While critically engaging colonial representations, this volume also grapples with the absences, gaps, and silences that haunt the colonial record. Responding to an “absence of written narrative,” Nicole N. Aljoe’s essay reads the characterization of enslaved Caribbean women as “mute figures” in the archive as demonstrative of “the sheer horror, loss and dislocation of violent forced transplantation” (“Creole Testimonies in Caribbean Women’s Slave Narratives,” 47). Aljoe establishes how such silence and absence in the colonial archive represents more than “textualization can articulate” by elucidating “the complexities of gender within Caribbean colonial historical discourse” (48). At the same time, Janelle Rodriques’s essay engages fictionalized Anglo-European accounts of slave rebellions to locate Obeah as a “spectre, haunting the unseen but still perceptible limits of imperialist fantasy” (“Obeah, Religion, and Nineteenth-Century Literature of the Anglophone Caribbean,” 210). Rupturing the delegitimization of slave resistance and spirituality in the colonial record, Rodriques examines the pluralities, fluidity, and relationality of the religious and spiritual traditions brought by enslaved Africans to the Caribbean to demonstrate how Obeah—as a “unifying set of principles for enslaved West Indian religious, cultural, and political expression” that facilitates “sustained resistance to the dominant machine of the plantation”—haunts colonial depictions of slave rebellion (209, 199).

Similarly contributing to the volume’s work toward counter hegemonic historicization of colonial encounter in the Caribbean, Atreyee Phukan expands the canon of Asian Caribbean literature by recovering narratives of South Asian indentured laborers. Phukan reframes indenture as “a period marked by cultural fluidity and flux, rather than ossification and stagnation,” that required indentured laborers to simultaneously grapple with the unjust labor system of indentureship while forging a “unique subaltern consciousness” in a “new transcultural space” (“South Asian Migration and Settlement Stories, 1800–1920,” 289). Unsettling the imagined cross-cultural and linguistic boundaries of the early Caribbean, Phukan effectively remaps the trajectory of indenture from “a physical transgression inviting loss and exile” (289) to a “site of continuous negotiations” by revealing how indentured laborers contributed to the cultural histories of the francophone and Dutch-speaking Caribbean through a “transcultural Indianness” and Asian creolization (279). 

Moving beyond the textual, the volume’s commitment to rethink the colonial archive reorients focus to the potentialities of oral history, public media, performance, and more in shaping the cultural, political, and social pluralities of the Caribbean. For Rhonda Cobham-Sander, a more “expansive vision of the Caribbean literary archive” is achieved “by imagining Caribbean cultural production as negotiating multiple overlapping ethnic, national, and racial diasporas and by constructing a literary history that moves beyond the boundaries [of] text-based archives” (“Caribbean Literature as Diasporic Archive,” 231). Troubling the geopolitical and racial distinctions reified in traditional archives, Cobham-Sander imagines a “diasporic and extratextual” Caribbean archival practice, “enabled by the digital age,” that “expands our understanding of the range of agents, desires, and imaginative possibilities that writers and artists of the Caribbean and its diaspora announce, elide, recuperate, and revise in their work, allowing us to read them all as constituting a constantly evolving Caribbean literary tradition” (243). 

Shifting our approach to early Caribbean literature to encompass a burgeoning Caribbean digital world holds to a longstanding Caribbean aesthetic shaped in the excess of ongoing spatial-temporal convergences of peoples, places, stories, and world-making practices. Keeping to this tradition, this first volume invites us to rethink our own encounters by contending with the categories and genres produced and reinforced by the colonial archive and literary traditions that continue to shape our engagement with early Caribbean literature. 

Similarly invested in encounter, the second volume in the series, Caribbean in Transition: 1920–1970, takes up the multifarious convergences of the anglophone, francophone, and hispanophone Caribbean of the early mid-twentieth century to elucidate the intersections of the sociopolitical and literary histories of these societies. Establishing the significance of this era, the essays collected by the editors, Raphael Dalleo and Curdella Forbes, expand on the critical concepts that continue to frame our engagement with contemporary Caribbean literature, highlighting how Caribbean writers and thinkers in the early-mid-twentieth century “had already gone beyond nationalism or creolization, or any narrow conception of these, toward global and cross-cultural imaginaries that are more readily made intelligible through current conceptual frameworks which highlight relation, globality, and black Atlantic / Kala Pani discourse” (introduction, 2). 

The second volume continues to rupture the spatiotemporal boundaries of the past, present, and future by tending to the porosity of history, memory, and desire in shaping Caribbean futures. Examining ritual performance in the francophone and anglophone Caribbean theater, Jason Allen-Paisant marks an emerging theater practice in the 1930s–70s Caribbean that responds to the “crushing history of slavery and Empire” by “enlist[ing] the resources of spirit to translate a sense of absent presence, tracing the outlines of memory in an effort to reshape the future and contextualize the past” (“Towards a National Theatre,” 68). While crucially distinguishing differing political formations and cultural productions in the francophone and anglophone Caribbean, in exploring the continuities of collective memory, embodied desire, and ritual across linguistic regions, Allen-Paisant traces a cross-cultural theatre praxis that, through the performing body, mobilizes “artistic responses to cultural trauma through transformative ritual” to “translate trauma, memory, and a desired social future” on the material stage (80, 75). 

Marking the complex cultural and political transition periods of the Caribbean, writers look to language and people to better understand the work of social (re)definition as we know it today. Amanda T. Perry’s essay on cross-Caribbean dialogues and the hispanophone Caribbean illuminates for readers the manifold ways in which Cuba remains a contested site of cultural influence in the shaping of everyday anglophone Caribbean society. Beginning with the impact of the Cuban revolution, to then examining the camaraderie between Nicolàs Guillen and Brathwaite, Perry affirms that “by bringing together writers from across a linguistically fractured region, such institutions continue to shape the region’s literary culture” (“Cross-Caribbean Dialogues 1: Hispanophone,” 271). These fractures mutate and permeate not only across anglo-hispanophone relations. 

Dalleo contributes to the work of exhuming cross-cultural instances between the anglophone and francophone Caribbean and their artistic movements. His turn to the richness that is Haiti and its role in the shaping of conversations about postcolonial island societies “serves as a reminder that literary histories of individual islands or language groups exist not in isolation but in dialogue with the region as a whole” (“Cross-Caribbean Dialogues 2: Francophone,” 276). These dialogues that are unfolding in the wake of revolution across francophone Caribbean societies are both material and ideological extensions of broader attempts to actively decolonize multilingual, multicultural island societies long vexed by the harmful demands of the colonial and Eurocentric-indebted ruling class. 

For early-to-mid-1900s literary anglophone Caribbean society in particular, decolonization efforts would also include what Glyne Griffith considers the forging of the regional critical canon. Griffith’s study of the literary and cultural criticism traditions in the region offers further evidence of the interconnections of Caribbean people and spaces as regional “political and ideological conjunctural changes promoted interpretive environments that were disposed to read breaks or bifurcations into the narrative of canonical development where, in effect, there were far more continuities than disjunctions” (“Forging the Critical Canon,” 294). It is this celebration of simultaneous continuities and disjunctions across the region that is evidence of a particular ethos governing the essays in Caribbean Literature in Transition: 1920–1970.

While the second volume thinks closely about the importance of cross-Caribbean transitions, the third volume of essays, Caribbean Literature in Transition: 1970–2020, homes in on the relationship between transition and the plurality of peoples, literatures, and spaces sustaining Caribbean literary traditions during the late twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries. Engaging Caribbean literature of this period through the critical lens of both assemblage and transition, the volume signals a collective commitment to the ongoing potentialities of Caribbean literary futures. Turning from the “previously encompassing and incorporating agendas of Caribbean literature” (introduction, 1), this volume’s “conscious transition” to assemblage relocates Caribbean literary, cultural, and social production within the ongoing “inheritances of fluidity, fragments, and multiplicities bequeathed by the many complex histories and narratives” that shape the region and effectively “defy the orthodox conventions of literary description and evaluation” (2).

In line with the volume’s commitment to read against the grain of “colonial enterprise and its so-called civilizing mission” that engenders literature as a “disciplinary endeavour” (2), Rebecca Romdhani examines speculative fiction and the reimagining of Caribbean time and space urges readers to deliberately “rethink generic categories” (“Reimagining Caribbean Time and Space: Speculative Fiction,” 119). Mapping the “abundance of speculative fiction” across the region by tracing the Caribbean’s “long history” of gothic, multigenre, folklore, and magic realist literature, Rombhani signals how rethinking the very categories that have come to define how Caribbean people and spaces exist and persist moves us closer to the realization that “the seed of possible future(s) of the Caribbean lies in its past lives” (130). 

It is in the definitive past lives of the region that Kei Miller initially grounds his essay about Caribbean creative nonfiction as theory and practice. Miller expresses that Christopher Columbus’s letter is “the first example of creative nonfiction from the Caribbean though its creativity rested not in its literary flair but in its creative license—in precisely those moments that undermined its claim to nonfiction” (“Here Are the Others: Caribbean Creative Nonfiction,” 149). Tracing the tradition of Caribbean nonfiction in a way that acknowledges the presence and contributions of those Europeans who first arrived to the region with the sole intention of exploiting and brutalizing the archipelago is representative of a (re)turn that is less concerned with venerating the colonizer and more concerned with reminding readers of the fact that the Caribbean region remains a complex geopolitical and sociocultural area that has always moved writers toward the creation of dynamic nonfiction. Writers continue to be moved by a region that is “profoundly marked by racial and linguistic diversity, creolizations and multiple pluralities” writes Miller (162). The plurality in experiences that emerge out of such diverse regional histories is such that “sometimes the only commonality is indeed the uncommonality between the works” produced by Caribbean writers in the mid-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (160).

An acknowledgement of the pluralities governing the Caribbean region means moving beyond what Allison Donnell and Nalini Mohabir describe in their essay as “conventional historical reimagining” of pivotal events (“Writing of and for a Revolution,” 201). The 1970–2020 period further teaches us that “the project of Caribbean literature across the region has been centrally concerned since its beginnings both with a restoration of local lives, voices and histories, and with a rebellion against the authorizing paradigms of colonialism and its cultural grammars of normalized inequality” (202). This work of restoration must continue to account for the many distinctions and divergences that remain vital to the functioning of Caribbean societies. And the work of restoration must now also include an account of Caribbean digital worlds. Kelly Baker Josephs posits that because of the influence of the world wide web in the Caribbean, ideas of who and what is a Caribbean writer are expanding in the twenty-first century. Indeed, “the old divide of oral versus print Caribbean storytellers becomes less significant, though not imperceptible, broadening how we think of Caribbean literature and literary practices” (“Digital Yards: Caribbean Writing on Social Media and Other Digital Platforms,” 220). And while the introduction of digital practices further adds to the pluralities of voices shaping Caribbean literary worlds, “print [remains] one of the ways we preserve traces of digital communities of creation and communication” (232). In the present, the future of Caribbean literature must tap into the digital turn while retaining those aspects of print culture that continue to meaningfully serve past, present, and future island society.

The convergence of past, present, and future sustained across all three works is perhaps best explained in the third volume by its editors, Ronald Cummings and Alison Donnell: “As the past overlays the future and the future returns to the past, the tidelectics of memory, desire, prophecy, imagination and interpretation in our critical ecologies will continue to generate complexly pluralized, inevitably partial and valuably mobile versions of Caribbean literatures” (introduction, 11). Although each volume in the series offers insights particular to its respective period, in its entirety, Caribbean Literature in Transition emerges as a collective gathering of critical interventions that, in tracing the manifold transformations and transitions of Caribbean literature, manages to refute any linear trajectory. Ultimately, this series locates the complexity of contemporary preoccupations with belonging, identity, and freedom in relation to the histories of oppression and resistance that have shaped the region, an ongoing relationality that continues to inform Caribbean cultural, creative, and critical productions.

Maddi Chan is a writer, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council–funded scholar, and PhD candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. Her creative and scholarly work is entangled with Caribbean-feminist, queer, and anticolonial knowledge production and pedagogy. She is the co-creator of Pedagogies of Hope, a SHHRC-funded collective of transnational scholars, activists, and artists invested in pedagogies that transgress the boundaries of mainstream learning. 

Linzey Corridon is a writer, Vanier Canada Scholar, and PhD candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. His critical and creative research can be found in, among other venues, Canada and Beyond, Wasafiri, sx salon, and the Journal of West Indian Literature. West of West Indian (Mawenzi House, 2024) is his debut book-length project.