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Reviewed by:
  • Teaching Anglophone Caribbean Literature ed. by Supriya M. Nair
  • Simone A. James Alexander
Teaching Anglophone Caribbean Literature
Ed. Supriya M. Nair
New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2012.
ix + 459 pp. ISBN 9781603291071 paper.

Drawing on George Lamming’s trope “sovereignty of the imagination” that chronicles the English-speaking Caribbean region’s quest for autonomy, for cultural and literary identity, Supriya Nair argues that while anglophone Caribbean literature shares a literary lineage with the English, it “is one example of cultural sovereignty from the English” (3). At the same time, Nair pinpoints that “neatly fencing in” Caribbean literature is impossible, if not implausible. Multiple countries, languages, literary and cultural traditions, as well as patterns of migration and migratory forces, complicate the easy categorization of Caribbean literature. Further, the definition of anglophone Caribbean literature is not fixed and, as a result, presents its own challenges.

Divided into five sections—“Movements and Migrations,” “Ritual, Performance, and Popular Culture,” “Interpretive Approaches,” “Course Contexts,” and “Teaching Resources”—Teaching Anglophone Caribbean Literature provides an extensive examination of different genres: autobiography, fiction, film, poetry, memoirs, drama, music, and dance, beginning with the “premodern period” to the present. In equal manner, the topics examined are wide-ranging, including sexuality, rum consumption, Caribbean immigrants as Harlemites, the gothic in Caribbean literature, and the unavoidable use and focus of media and technology in courses on Caribbean literature. The majority of the contributors are housed in English departments.

Despite the growing presence of Caribbean literature in the United States, it still struggles to find “a room of its own in the US academy.” Nair writes, “Its consolidation into [area studies], namely black studies, ethnic studies, Latin American literature . . . has sometimes led to its subsidiary status in the dominant theoretical or historical frames . . .” (3). This subordinate status of Caribbean literature in the United States academy parallels the invisibility and marginalization of writers who live and work in the Caribbean, whose work “is not a high priority in the United States” (11).

One of the challenges of arriving at a fixed definition of anglophone Caribbean literature is that works of fiction of US-based, non-anglophone authors such as Edwidge Danticat and Junot Diaz are included in the literary canon. As Nair points out, “The Caribbean canon is a moving target” (8). Even so, some authors argue that the term anglophone does not represent other groups adequately, namely francophone and hispanophone. Many authors in this volume, including Halloran, discuss the challenge of using the term Caribbean, of arguing for a distinct Caribbean literary tradition, to describe or to capture the region’s linguistic and geographic complexities. Halloran shares that in her course on Caribbean literature she calls attention to the problematic nature of using the term Caribbean “to describe literatures written in different languages by writers who may or may not have ever lived on an island” (333–34). She underscores that this seamless classification of the term is both challenging and intriguing to students in that it [End Page 170] shifts their perceptions, their “natural assumptions that there is both a place and a people who can be seamlessly classified as Caribbean” (334).

Naming the term anglophone an epithet, Carolyn Cooper persuasively argues that it is a misnomer. One of its major deficits is that it does not capture the “full linguistic range of this corpus of literary texts” (155). Cognizant that many of the texts are written in English, she nevertheless argues that the “widespread use of local creoles” in anglophone texts is worthy of recognition and should be acknowledged, as should oral texts (155). To this end, she “refines” the descriptor anglophone as “creole-Anglophone,” legitimizing the vernacular and the oral tradition as a whole. Along similar lines, Shemak comments that despite the fact that the term anglophone is linked intrinsically with British colonialism, we need to complicate and expand our understanding of it by taking into account the changing trends of migration and the impact that the US has in the region.

While attendant to the evolving definition of anglophone Caribbean literature and the generational shift of both Caribbean writers and present-day students, Nair and other contributors call for a rethinking of the “current...

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