Chapter 2 asks how one constructs a tradition and transforms an available genre in the absence of one’s own. An essay on the flower “jasmine,” triggered by a remark that in the tropics one did not know what the daffodils in Wordsworth’s heavily anthologized poem meant, is the starting point of this chapter. How to connect language to thought and how to reconcile a language with an absent tradition takes Naipaul to a search for an appropriate genre that would function as creative structural plinths to his Trinidadian social comedies. At Oxford he had translated the picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes but had failed to find a publisher for it. Now he turns to the picaresque genre and its more immediate expressions in Joyce and Steinbeck as a vehicle for his representation of an essentially Trinidadian picaroon society. In the act, Naipaul consciously deconstructs the regulatory nature of the law of genre with its very opposite, its tendency towards disorder. The chapter examines Naipaul’s early works beginning with Miguel Street (1959), his first written work albeit third published, as well as the cinematic adaptation of The Mystic Masseur.

This chapter provides an account first of the nature of English literary study in the colonial Caribbean, and then of Caribbean attempts to decolonize the practice in the later twentieth century. It analyzes the evolving ways scholars and teachers have understood the “coloniality” of the practices they inherited, and the different means by which they have attempted to change them. It also analyzes representations of literary study in works of Caribbean literature. It schematizes the decolonization of English literary study into three broad movements. First, it describes attempts to incorporate more material by Caribbean writers on literary curricula after independence. Second, focusing on Sylvia Wynter’s early essays, it describes the incorporation of anticolonial forms of critique in critical method. Finally, it shows how Caribbean scholars expanded the purview of literary studies, incorporating analysis of popular forms including calypso and dancehall. Overall, the chapter asks how scholars in the anglophone Caribbean have understood the task of decolonizing the English literary curriculum and what lessons this might hold for those working both within and outside the Caribbean today.

The parallel and intersecting relationships among the written and oral literatures, folklore, musics, performative arts, and orature of the Anglophone Caribbean have been well documented, giving rise to a large body of critical work in literary and cultural studies by scholars such as Mervyn Morris, Kamau Brathwaite, Gordon Rohlehr, and Funso Ayejina. Sustained treatments such as Carolyn Cooper’s Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (1993), Kwame Dawes’ Natural Mysticism: Towards a New Reggae Aesthetic in Caribbean Writing (1999), and special issues of academic journals illustrate the growing acknowledgement of these oral–scribal intersections. With a steady growth from the 1920s onward, these cross-genre, cross-media fertilizations reached a high point in the 1970s with the rise and globalization of new forms/expressions of urban music, against the background of major local, regional, and global shifts such as the escalation of nationalist contentions; the Black Power movement; and in Jamaica, the ‘official’ recognition of Rastafari, and the emergence of new dub poetry and other newer genres. The consolidation and recognition of the synergies between orature and literature have in turn fashioned a substantial body of theorizations and scholarly contemplations out of which have emerged terms such as oraliterature, novelylspo, reggae aesthetic, among others.