Toussaint Louverture, hero of the Haitian Revolution, occupies a key space in the imagination of Black masculinity across his own time up through the present day.This chapter traces the way Toussaint Louverture’s body, in particular, is reimagined and represented both as a symbol for Black heroism and, taken together as an oeuvre, as a figure that undoes this masculine paradigm of Black politics. In texts as varied as C. L. R. James’s, The Black Jacobins, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Édouard Glissant’s Monsieur Toussaint, and Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls, as well as visual art, cinema, public monuments, performances, children’s books, and his own memoir, Louverture’s body reads across various times, spaces, and forms as a site of desire, vulnerability, and contested lineage for Black masculine “freedom dreams.” His continued embodied celebrity is more complex than an individual text’s objectification, and instead acts as a recurring scenario of Black political negotiation across key historical moments.

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 family saga novel – predicated on the assumption of knowable genealogies and on the conceit that the stories of single families can convey the stories of nations – is a fertile and yet fraught territory for Caribbean writers. Maryse Condé has explored this territory more extensively than any other; her novels both reiterate the appeal of genealogical claims and register a clear-eyed suspicion of the notion of lineage and the mythologizing that attends it. Focusing mostly on Tree of Life and The Last of the African Kings, this chapter examines Condé’s mapping of women’s role in biological and narrative reproduction – the essential processes of family formation across time and space, and therefore the engines that power diasporic family sagas. Condé elucidates how this dual reproductive role continually brings women up against the demands and strictures of patriarchy, impacts their erotic and intellectual autonomy, and structurally determines their relationships to other women.

This essay discusses a series of links connecting Caribbean literature and the visual arts, paying particular attention to shared conceptual, critical preoccupations and visual vocabularies, as well as rhetorical strategies and aesthetic across art forms. It traces important stages in the ongoing dialogue between literature and art, including the foundational role of interdisciplinary movements, journals, art spaces and collaborations among writers and artists.

The essays in this volume assess the field of early Caribbean literary studies at a moment when it is undergoing important transitions. Our contributors study genres of writing previously marginalized as nonliterary: popular writing in newspapers and pamphlets; genres of fiction and poetry such as romances, sentimental novels, and ballads; non-elite memoirs and letters, such as the narratives of the enslaved and the working classes, especially women. Contributors focus on the multilingual, multi-imperial, and regional literatures of the Caribbean, in keeping with the comparative emphasis in contemporary literary studies. Our contributors infer the cultural presence of non-elite groups within the texts of the dominant classes: can the worlds made by enslaved and indentured people be reconstructed by reading texts that enslavers created? Our contributors move back and forth between time periods, linking texts, writers, and literary movements together in ways that exceed traditional notions of literary influence. The analysis of Caribbean literature before 1920 is a vital exercise in understanding our present moment.

In the years after the Great War, many national literatures registered anxiety about the course of Western civilization. American modernism sometimes presented itself as exceptional on this subject – as untouched by European prospects of decline, or as vitally wedded to regeneration through violence. This chapter considers poetic responses to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). As a poem written by an American living in Europe, The Waste Land both raises the apocalyptic subject for American writers and allows opportunities for national self-definition by contrast. To Hart Crane and William Carlos Williams, Eliot’s pessimism seemed to abandon the distinctive potential of American literature; in The Bridge (1930) and Spring and All (1923), these poets treat apocalypse in American history as an opportunity to encounter the new. Troubling the distinction implied here between conservative and radical apocalypticism, the chapter also illustrates how Eliot’s tragic apocalypse has been relevant to hemispheric writers of color, seeking to represent the cataclysmic settling of a continent. In his Rights of Passage (1967), Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite reworks from The Waste Land a sense of apocalyptic time wherein the past – including The Waste Land itself – is perpetually disfigured but remains ruinously present.