Essays

Positioning the Caribbean within the complexes of the world community, this collection uses the metaphor of the global Caribbean to discuss the multiple movements, identities, epistemologies and politics of the West Indies. Examining the processes of the transnational transport of peoples, languages, and literatures between the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, and North America, the essays look at the complexities of geographical, intellectual, and artistic migrations: at the ways Caribbean writers negotiate the construction of literary and political identities and the ways in which the Caribbean influenced writers and thinkers in North America or Europe. These kinds of reciprocal exchanges locate the islands of the Caribbean within a global context, as recipients of multi- and trans-national influence and as makers of transnational meaning. Building on the dynamic processes of globalization, this collection suggests that the Caribbean provides a perspective for thinking about multiple intercultural connections with the Caribbean that include antebellum New Englanders, the Jews of twentieth-century Europe, literary artists of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and France, and modern pleasure seekers. A culturally and linguistically rich region of the world, the Caribbean also provides a fascinating literature of its own that is complicated by its history of migration and colonization, as well as by its location between continents.