The Caribbean poet and playwright Derek Walcott was an early and heretofore relatively unrecognized exemplar for Seamus Heaney, who began reading Walcott in the 1960s and continued engaging with his work his entire career. Walcott’s example enabled Heaney to realize that he could be true to his mixed and multiple linguistic, cultural, literary, and political inheritances, and further, that dwelling amongst such identities could be a position of poetic strength. This essay shows how Walcott confirmed Heaney’s penchant for memorializing historical atrocities committed against members of minority communities across the “Black and Green Atlantic.” At the same time, Walcott’s nuanced poetry modeled how Heaney might enrich and complicate his poetry of witness by seeking rapprochement with such perpetrators through registering their common humanity through their local language. Walcott’s poetic integrity thus influenced Heaney’s continuing attempts to draw on the divisive conflict in Northern Ireland by exploring how literature might not linger on the wound of racialized resentment but finally transcend that situation and ascend into a condition akin to Walcottian song.

This chapter traces the contours of Derek Walcott’s career from regional Caribbean author to English-based publishing success to relocation to the United States in the American university system. Shortly after the publication of Omeros in 1990, Walcott became the Caribbean region’s first writer of colour to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, an award associated with a wider recognition of a new Caribbean literary 'province' that had emerged in similar ways to the Irish and American 'provinces' of the early twentieth century. Omeros is an ambitious epic work that attempts to totalize both Walcott’s and the Caribbean region’s mixed indigenous, European, African and American heritages. But, like other earlier modernist epics, Omeros combines an exultant sense of literary accomplishment with anxieties of failure. As promises of new postcolonial beginnings for the Caribbean slide into visions of climate catastrophe, and as Walcott finds himself an émigré in an imperial and racist America, the poem oscillates between its affirmative and apocalyptic impulses.

This essay charts key aspects of the development of canonical literary criticism in the English-speaking Caribbean. It argues that a full understanding of the ways in which proliferating critical statements coalesced into a major body of evaluative work across the decades, from the 1930s through the 1970s, needs to account for the diverse and intersecting communicative platforms the criticism relied upon. The burgeoning criticism responded to the blossoming of anglophone Caribbean literature in the post World War II period via print venues such as Bim in Barbados, Kyk-over-al in Guyana, and the Jamaica Journal and Caribbean Quarterly in Jamaica. In addition, during the decades of the 1940s and 1950s, the BBC literary radio programme Caribbean Voices functioned as a platform for the production and dissemination of Caribbean literary and cultural criticism. As such, the development of the critical canon in the anglophone Caribbean is not only the story of intersecting and mutually supportive media, print and electronic, but also the story of transatlantic knowledge flows. The essay therefore proposes that the intersection of print and electronic media and the robust transatlantic knowledge flows call into question, in the contemporary moment, any enduring distinction between those putative binaries that energized so many of the critical arguments of the period, viz. home vs. exile, oral vs. scribal, and folk criticism vs. cosmopolitan practice.

Very little has been written on Anglophone Caribbean theatre (the few publications include work by Judy Stone, Errol Hill, Richardson Wright, Rex Nettleford, and Wycliffe and Hazel Bennett). As for theatre from the French-speaking Caribbean, it also remains an understudied field. A few book-length studies (Bérard, Sahakian, Artheron) on theatre from the French Caribbean (Martinique, Guadeloupe. and French Guyana) have emerged in recent years; however, the extraordinary and rich theatre tradition of Haiti has been almost entirely neglected by scholars and critics of Caribbean theatre. Yet drama, in the form of dance theatre, music theatre, various forms of ritual theatre, political theatre, and national pantomimes, has not only been at the heart of the Caribbean literary and cultural sensibility. The genre in its various forms has played a major role in nationalist movements across the Caribbean, and in attempts at cultural decolonization viewed as indispensable to processes of political and social decolonization. This paper focuses on ritual theatre during the decades of the 1930s to the 1970s in the English- and French-speaking Caribbean, an era in playwriting and staging marked by returns to the Haitian Revolution; major investments in history; ancestral recuperation; politics and traditional culture; and cultural decolonization through the project of rewriting colonial narratives. I argue that ritual theatrical forms, enlisting Afro-derived Caribbean ontologies, reflected the importance of the sacred in affecting the material conditions of existence in the colonized post-slavery societies of the Caribbean.

This essay examines significant trends in Caribbean drama and performance since 1970. From Errol Hill’s vision of a Caribbean national theatre rooted in the traditions of carnival, to Derek Walcott’s engagement with the conditions of colonialism, syncretism is key. Folk and popular culture have assumed a prominent place within Caribbean theatre as part of the process of artistic decolonization. The essay examines plays by Patrick Chamoiseau and Patricia Cumper, which engage in ‘canonical counter-discourse’, before turning to works which explore Afrocentrism and an independent Caribbean identity (seen in the dramas of Hill and Walcott). Performances committed to the consideration of domestic political contexts, foregrounding issues of gender and class, are explored in the work of the Sistren Theatre Collective and Grupo Teatro Escambray, while their legacies are seen in the queer theatre work of Caribbean diaspora artists such as d’bi.young anitafrika and Staceyann Chin.