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Rise of a New World: Postcolonialism and Caribbean Literature
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Rise of a New World: Postcolonialism and Caribbean Literature

A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (6 April 2025) | Viewed by 3202

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Curdella Forbes

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of English, Howard University, Washington, DC 20059, USA
Interests: Caribbean literary and cultural history; Caribbean poetics, and diaspora and modernity studies
Dr. Kezia Page

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
English and Creative Writing, Africana and Latin American Studies, Colgate University, Hamilton, NY 1334, USA
Interests: Caribbean literature; African diaspora literatures and African American literature; American immigrant literature

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The Caribbean’s literary practice inhabits multiple intersectional postcolonialities, having material touchpoints with Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, the rest of the Americas, the African diaspora elsewhere, and of course, Western Europe and the indigenous peoples of the hemisphere whether still living or long eradicated. This is an intersectionality that results from the Caribbean’s founding as a cataclysmic meeting point between several major world cultures, and the region’s subsequent unrolling as home to multiple diasporas that are at once heterogeneously integrated, and still engaged in an ongoing process of decolonial self–determination and self- making.  To borrow words from Wilson Harris, we might call  this ongoing process an ‘unfinished genesis’ of the ‘arts of the imagination’.

 The Caribbean’s imaginative response to its environment and the historical ‘legacy’  of colonialism is characteristically activist in intention. At one level we see an attempt to articulate the politics, poetics and aesthetics of revolution and self-determination in the face of ongoing structures of repression, whether overtly or covertly colonial, or otherwise.  Yet at another, we may trace a continuing thread of self-referentiality (a self-speaking rather than an answering back), and, beyond this, a movement towards epistemologies of the self and the human that predate or transcend the boundaries of history constructed as a movement of past, present and future time. Among the imaginative practices that drive such decolonial and self-speaking projects we may count the range of spiritualist and cross-genre arts practiced and promulgated by writer-theorists throughout the region and its extra-regional diasporas. We count as well, collaborations by writers and other activists across language zones that divide the region, and across global and regional diasporas. Above all is the extraordinary fluidity of the literature in its ongoing quest for languages sufficient to the weight of recovery and consequential response.

This concept of the unfinished genesis of the arts of the imagination drives the call for papers under the main phrase ‘Rise of a New World’ with ‘Caribbean Literature and Postcolonialism’ as a secondary moniker. Our use of the secondary moniker signals Caribbean writers’ ‘quarrel with history’ (Edward Baugh) –in this context the insufficiency of ‘postcolonialism’ as a singular concept to describe the diverse and shifting, mainly indigenous lenses, through which Caribbean cultural-literary discourse addresses space, time and ontological experience. ‘Rise of a New World’ acknowledges the ways the region’s writers, writer-theorists, scholars, and other activists have conceived the Caribbean across and beyond borders, whether created by imperial, colonial or postcolonial regimes.  ‘Rise of a new world’ indicates Caribbean literary poetics as an active political response to local, regional and global currents that are materially impacting Caribbean lives.

This special issue addresses the ways contemporary Caribbean writers and other cultural workers have responded to the conjunctural crises of the globalizing present, such as: ecological catastrophe; the rise of new surveillance machineries; terrorism and its relation to histories of trauma and loss; border imperialism and inter/intra im/migration cataclysms.  Of particular interest is the increasing emphasis on cross-genre arts, spiritualisms, futures past, and the unsettling of concepts of diaspora in the literature. A focus on theorizations and critical interventions through which this literature has been interpreted is also of interest. 

 We invite papers on contemporary Caribbean literature that address but are not limited to the following:

  • Eco-critical interventions: natural disasters, forest struggles, seas, rivers, canals, toxic waste, the commodification of the natural world
  • Tourism: fragile economies, vulnerable ecologies, sex trade and human trafficking
  • Surveillance: New and historical surveillance machineries; gang warfare; new media; social media; the internet
  • Im/migration: nationalisms and border imperialism; emerging diasporas; demographic exchange and the economics of globalization
  • Breakup of nation states
  • Terrorism, trauma and loss: mourning in the aftermath of catastrophe; de/sacralized   universes; spiritual wastelands
  • Neo-slave narratives and the poetics of horror
  • Haiti in the Caribbean imaginary
  • Dutch Caribbean literature
  • Spiritual crossings: Caribbean futures past; ‘other’ territories of the human; mythopoetics
  • New Caribbean collaborations: book clubs, reading groups, journals, cross- disciplinary and cross-diasporan conversations
  • Genre crossings: literature, theory, music, popular culture, the visual and performing arts
  • Theories of crossing: tidalectics; black and burning beaches and open boats; continents of black consciousness; relationalities; creolizations; indigenizations; repeating islands; silences that break; maps that move
  • Spaces of resistance and revolution: mangroves, kitchen tables, streets, street theaters, new languages; the archive and the counter archive
  • Sexualities, genders and interrogations of traditional family
  • Indigenous and unrepresented presence

Dr. Curdella Forbes
Dr. Kezia Page
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Caribbean literature
  • postcolonialism
  • crises of the globalizing present
  • multiple diasporas
  • decolonial self-determination
  • rise of a new world

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Published Papers (5 papers)

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Research

13 pages, 238 KiB  
Article
Tell Me/‘I Am Listening’: Ocean Stirrings and the Creole Vocalization of Nelson’s Royal Readers
by Antonia MacDonald
Humanities 2025, 14(5), 109; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14050109 - 19 May 2025
Viewed by 191
Abstract
In this article, I explore Merle Collins’ reworking of poems from the Nelson’s Royal Readers. Focusing on Part V of Ocean Stirrings, I explore Collins’ use of poetic form to represent the mental unravelling and restitching of Louise Langdon Norton Little, the [...] Read more.
In this article, I explore Merle Collins’ reworking of poems from the Nelson’s Royal Readers. Focusing on Part V of Ocean Stirrings, I explore Collins’ use of poetic form to represent the mental unravelling and restitching of Louise Langdon Norton Little, the mother of Malcolm X. Louise Litte—a Grenadian migrant woman—is depicted as unmoored by the travails of racism in early twentieth century USA. Louise’s ensuing psychological cataclysm is refracted through the prism of the memories of her grandmother’s Creole voice—an oral text which discursively radicalizes the colonial agenda that was core to the Royal Readers. I argue that Collins is intentional in her use of a decolonized poetic versification to represent Louise Little’s imaginative maneuvering into self-reclamation. Transposing her grief and loss onto the poems learnt when she was a child, Louise is depicted as poetically and creatively harnessing her grandmother’s grassroot wisdom on the value of strategic resilience. This retelling allows Louise to survive the trauma of her incarceration in a U.S. mental hospital and returns her to her Caribbean self: Oseyan. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Rise of a New World: Postcolonialism and Caribbean Literature)
14 pages, 223 KiB  
Article
Everyday Apocalypses: Debt and Dystopia in Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Here Comes the Sun
by Michael Niblett
Humanities 2025, 14(5), 105; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14050105 - 2 May 2025
Viewed by 339
Abstract
Writing in November 2010 in the aftermath of a series of devastating hurricanes, Norman Girvan admitted to “a growing sense that Caribbean states may be more and more facing a challenge of existential threats”. By this, he continues, “I mean systemic challenges to [...] Read more.
Writing in November 2010 in the aftermath of a series of devastating hurricanes, Norman Girvan admitted to “a growing sense that Caribbean states may be more and more facing a challenge of existential threats”. By this, he continues, “I mean systemic challenges to the viability of our states as functioning socio-economic-ecological-political systems” due to “the intersection of climatic, economic, social and political developments”. In this article, I examine the specifically literary response to these existential threats. My focus is on Nicole Dennis-Benn’s novel Here Comes the Sun (2016), which offers a searing critique of what I term the apocalypse of the everyday, that is, of the way capitalism’s logics of social death and ecocide permeate every facet of contemporary quotidian practice. I am particularly interested in Dennis-Benn’s registration of the impact of debt colonialism on Jamaica. Debt, for Girvan, is one of the contributing factors to the existential threat facing the Caribbean. However, the temporality of debt also provides a useful optic for understanding how Dennis-Benn’s novel grapples with the effects of the ongoing catastrophe of slavery and the plantation system, as well as with the erosion of futurity in apocalyptic times. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Rise of a New World: Postcolonialism and Caribbean Literature)
16 pages, 269 KiB  
Article
Cassava/Yuca/Manioc
by Keja Lys Valens
Humanities 2025, 14(4), 79; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14040079 - 31 Mar 2025
Viewed by 419
Abstract
Cassava/Yuca/Manioc: This staple of Indigenous Caribbean diets has gone from being decried for its danger and denigrated for its supposed inferiority to wheat by the early colonists, to being among the few foods that nourished slaves, to creolizing into postcolonial national dishes, and [...] Read more.
Cassava/Yuca/Manioc: This staple of Indigenous Caribbean diets has gone from being decried for its danger and denigrated for its supposed inferiority to wheat by the early colonists, to being among the few foods that nourished slaves, to creolizing into postcolonial national dishes, and to being touted as a wonder food resistant to the climate disaster and dietary breakdowns that manifest the slow violence of the colonial project. Is the uplifting of cassava the rise of the Caribbean plot, the next step in neocolonial globalist expropriation of things Caribbean, or something of both? This paper traces discourses of cassava from the writings of early colonialists like Pere Labat through Caribbean cookbooks of the independence era where it was creolized with African, European, and Asian techniques and traditions and into postcolonial diasporic food writing and commercial projects from Carmeta’s Bajan food independence through contemporary global agriculture projects promoting cassava. Cassava/Yuca/Manioc, this paper argues, continues to be deterritorialized on a global scale at the same time as, in the Caribbean, it continues to nourish locally grounded persistence, adaptation, resistance, and thriving. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Rise of a New World: Postcolonialism and Caribbean Literature)
15 pages, 257 KiB  
Article
“Conjoined Destinies”: The Poetics and Politics of Black Migrations in Jason Allen-Paisant’s Self-Portrait as Othello
by Hannah Regis
Humanities 2025, 14(3), 43; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14030043 - 24 Feb 2025
Viewed by 429
Abstract
Jason Allen-Paisant in Self-Portrait as Othello moves unflinchingly through complex histories and genealogies that widen to include Jamaica, Venice, Italy, France, and elsewhere and to locate the duppy manifestations of an unburied past in the pervasive precariousness of Black life. Across his poems, [...] Read more.
Jason Allen-Paisant in Self-Portrait as Othello moves unflinchingly through complex histories and genealogies that widen to include Jamaica, Venice, Italy, France, and elsewhere and to locate the duppy manifestations of an unburied past in the pervasive precariousness of Black life. Across his poems, he tracks the chaotic reverberations of intergenerational traumas that persist across time, space and collective memory. This paper contends that the poet, through his use of allusion evident in his grafting and borrowings of other stories, literary syncretism, the symbolism of foreignness and its mysterious power, back and forth journeys through Europe and into homelands (Jamaica), procures an integrated circuit of Black meaning and kindred relations. This interconnectedness lays bare the sociohistorical conditions that have and continue to circumscribe and assault Black lives and deconstructs the perpetuity of anti-Black systems in the modern Western world. For all his worldly travels, the poet-narrator situates himself in an interstitial zone where each crossroad leads to new possibilities and affirmative energy. Allen-Paisant thus offers a way to reconcile a vicious history of Black xenophobia while procuring moments and processes to make peace with rupturous spaces, which necessitates a return to his homeland. However, homecoming complicates the search for self and the idea of return draws him into a dialogue with the fragmented inheritances of his past. He ultimately achieves coherence and fresh understandings through images of sterility and barrenness which he re-purposes as a foundation to make bold leaps of faith across uncertain chasms. This paper thus argues that for the poet of the African diaspora, who aspires to recover a long and complex spiritual history, the interface between domestic and international dramas highlights the luminous transcendence embodied in the journey along complicated routes and the steadfast pursuit of ideas that illuminate the deepest insights about identity, culture and the Black experience. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Rise of a New World: Postcolonialism and Caribbean Literature)
15 pages, 249 KiB  
Article
What Is Heritable: Power, Magic and Spirit in Marie-Elena John’s Unburnable
by Rachel L. Mordecai
Humanities 2025, 14(2), 38; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14020038 - 19 Feb 2025
Viewed by 330
Abstract
In Marie-Elena John’s 2006 novel Unburnable, Lillian Baptiste returns to Dominica from the United States intending to confront the secrets and traumas of her maternal family line. The novel structures Lillian’s developing apprehension of who her mother and grandmother were and what [...] Read more.
In Marie-Elena John’s 2006 novel Unburnable, Lillian Baptiste returns to Dominica from the United States intending to confront the secrets and traumas of her maternal family line. The novel structures Lillian’s developing apprehension of who her mother and grandmother were and what they endured in late-colonial Dominica around a series of revelations regarding each woman’s imbrication within the realm of the magico-spiritual, which includes magic, Obeah and their cognates; Catholicism; spells and curses; ghosts and other spirit manifestations; and extra-sensory perception. The reader comes to understand Lillian as (and sometimes before) Lillian comes to understand herself: the last in a line of magico-spiritually powerful women whose encounters with colonial catastrophe and its heteropatriarchal, racist–classist machinations are both figured through and navigated by way of that power. Where socioeconomic and political power may conventionally be regarded as the proper subject of realist fiction and social-science inquiry, and magico-spiritual power as within the ambit of magical-realist fiction and folklore studies, Unburnable proposes worldly and magico-spiritual power as inhabiting the same material, political and psycho-social plane of Caribbean reality: as mutually entangled, co-constituting, reciprocally illuminating and, above all, dually heritable forces. In this way, the novel issues an invitation to rethink questions of power in the shadow of the Caribbean plantation and consider anew the ways in which it is, on the one hand, hoarded, bequeathed and weaponized against the vulnerable and, on the other, fluid, arcane in its sources and workings, and susceptible to insurgent counter-deployments. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Rise of a New World: Postcolonialism and Caribbean Literature)
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