Abstract

Chapter 5 traces the progression of the postcolonial poetics developed by the Caribbean historian and poet Kamau Brathwaite as part of his groundbreaking reformulation of the Creole as the basis of Caribbean poetry and culture, from the inception of his project in the early 1960s, to its culmination in digital and virtual form in his "Sycorax Video Style." In his still ongoing attempt to articulate a vernacular voice for Caribbean culture, Brathwaite's later poetry involves an intermedial and interlingual transfer between the oral and the digital that aims at bridging the accumulative temporality of history and the performative temporality of poetics. Drawing on the work of postcolonial theorists Homi Bhabha, Paul Gilroy, Antonio Benítez Rojo, and Simon Gikandi, the chapter explores how the radically productive tension between the local and the cosmopolitan that Brathwaite finds at the core of Caribbean culture determines his creative and theoretical work toward the development and dissemination of a West Indian voice.

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