Postcolonial poetry, as both a body of poems and a field of critical discourse, furnishes opportunities to foreground anticolonial and antiracist work while attending to its aesthetic dimensions. Taking a cue from Vahni Capildeo’s “In 2190, Albion’s Civil Conflicts Finally Divided Along Norman-Saxon Lines,” this chapter suggests that their speculative poem enacts a decolonizing practice in at least three ways that ramify throughout postcolonial poetry more broadly: (i) it questions the politicized distinctions between outsiders and insiders, (ii) it makes available for poetry undervalued forms of language and definitions of home, and (iii) it embarks on a project of world-unmaking and world-remaking. Organized according to these three modes of practice, this chapter reflects on how university-level aesthetic education and pedagogy might elucidate the decolonizing work of poets and poems. At the same time, it tests the limits of the term “postcolonial poetry” for such decolonizing work. With a focus on Jamaican poets Louise Bennett, Lorna Goodison, and Kei Miller, the chapter also looks to Natalie Diaz, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Safia Elhillo, and Tjawangwa Dema.

This chapter focuses on Hughes’s friendship with the Jamaican poet and dramatist Louise Bennett throughout the 1950s and ’60s. The chapter approaches their friendship by way of letters written by Hughes to Bennett, through Hughes’s discussion of Bennett in his correspondence with other Black male diasporic writers, and by examining his discussion of Bennett’s work in a 1955 article on transnational Black migration in the Chicago Defender. While Hughes’s response to Bennett’s work, particularly his consequent laughter, alludes to his convoluted relationship to diasporic women’s writing, these sources reveal how Bennett’s Jamaican and highly gendered folk poetry influenced Hughes’s understanding of transnational Black experience and identity. In addition, by orienting Bennett’s life and work transnationally through the lens of her relationship to Hughes, the chapter also attempts to shift discourse on her folk aesthetic beyond national and domestic frames. Among other things, doing so extends the parameters through which we can interpret humor’s function in Bennett’s embodied performance of Jamaican folk culture.

This chapter considers poetic expressions during the period of transition from the late colonial to the postcolonial public sphere. It focuses on two exemplary moments in 1943: the publication of the first issue of Focus, an anthology of work by a group of Jamaican writers gathered around the artist and editor Edna Manley, and the moment that Louise Bennett secured a weekly column for her Creole verse in the Sunday edition of the national newspaper, the Daily Gleaner. Considering these two events in the context of the dynamics of the Jamaican literary field, the chapter makes a broader argument about the print culture of literary decolonization. Where previous accounts have tended to place emphasis on the importance of the little magazines that emerged during this period, this chapter argues that it was in the daily and weekly newspapers that we see the aesthetic contests that defined the process of cultural decolonization. Bennett, in particular, was focused squarely on colonizing the colonial print culture ‘in reverse’, as she sought to carve out a decolonial public space at the very heart of the colonial public sphere.

Language has long been acknowledged as a site of contestation in the Creole-anglophone Caribbean. English has, traditionally, been the exclusive language of both literary text and critical analysis. Conversely, the various Creoles of the Caribbean are not generally recognized as languages, let alone appropriate modes of literary expression. Debates about this contentious issue became a major flashpoint in the 1950s with the publication of V. S. Reid’s New Day (1949) and Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1953) in which Creole-speaking characters take centre stage. These debates gathered impetus in the 1970s with the publication of Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack, Monkey, Mervyn Morris’ positioning of Louise Bennett as a ‘serious’ writer following the publication of her volume Jamaica Labrish (1966), and Kamau Brathwaite’s 1970 establishment of the journal Savacou, all of which engaged the vernacular as a literary language. The growing influence of sociopolitical eruptions such as the Rastafari movement and Black Power also signified influential developments in the thinking about language. Through an examination of poetry and prose, the chapter assesses the significance of the historical debates about language beginning in the eighteenth century and concluding with a brief discussion of the legacy of these contestations in the present.