page_title: Postcolonial literature
section_title: West Indies
hierarchical_section_title: Postcolonial literature / The Americas / Caribbean Islands / West Indies
caption_attribution_description: English: Pauline Henriques and Samuel Selvon reading a story during the weekly Caribbean Voices programme in 1952. (BBC Caribbean Service) (Ever so sorry, Both Henriques's and Selvon's surnames are misspelled in the file name! I would change them in a heartbeat, but don't know how. Could some admin do it for me? Thanks!)
context_page_description: Post-colonialism is a broad cultural approach to the study of power relations between different groups, cultures or people, in which language, literature and translation play role Postcolonial literature is the literature by people from formerly colonized countries. It exists on all continents except Antarctica. Postcolonial literature often addresses the problems and consequences of the decolonization of a country, especially questions relating to the political and cultural independence of formerly subjugated people, and themes such as racialism and colonialism. A range of literary theory has evolved around the subject. It addresses the role of literature in perpetuating and challenging what postcolonial critic Edward Said refers to as cultural imperialism.
  Migrant literature and postcolonial literature show some considerable overlap. However, not all migration takes place in a colonial setting, and not all postcolonial literature deals with migration. A question of current debate is the extent to which postcolonial theory also speaks to migration literature in non-colonial settings.
context_section_description: An exemplar post-colonial novel is Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys (1890–1979), a mid-twentieth century novelist who was born and grew up in the Caribbean island of Dominica, though she was mainly resident in England from the age of 16. This novel is based on Jane Eyre (1847), by Charlotte Brontë, re-told from the perspective of a subaltern protagonist, Antoinette Cosway. It is the story of Cosway, a white Creole heiress, from the time of her youth in Jamaica, to her unhappy marriage to a certain English gentleman—he is never named by the author. He renames her to a prosaic Bertha, declares her mad, and requires her to relocate to England. Caught in an oppressive patriarchal society in which she fully belongs neither to the white Europeans nor the black Jamaicans, Cosway is Rhys' version of Brontë's devilish "madwoman in the attic." As with many postcolonial works, the novel deals with the themes of racial inequality and the harshness of displacement and assimilation. It is also concerned with power relations between men and women.
  The term "West Indies" first began to achieve wide currency in the 1950s, when writers such as Samuel Selvon, John Edgar Colwell Hearne, Edgar Mittelholzer, V.S. Naipaul, and George Lamming began to be published in the United Kingdom. A sense of a single literature developing across the islands was also encouraged in the 1940s by the BBC radio programme Caribbean Voices, which featured stories and poems written by West Indian authors, recorded in London under the direction of producer Henry Swanzy, and broadcast back to the islands. Magazines such as Kyk-Over-Al in Guyana, Bim in Barbados, and Focus in Jamaica, which published work by writers from across the region, also encouraged links and helped build an audience.
  Many – perhaps most – West Indian writers have found it necessary to leave their home territories and base themselves in the United Kingdom, the United States, or Canada in order to make a living from their work—in some cases spending the greater parts of their careers away from the territories of their birth. Critics in their adopted territories might argue that, for instance, V. S. Naipaul ought to be considered a British writer instead of a Trinidadian writer, or Jamaica Kincaid and Paule Marshall American writers, but most West Indian readers and critics still consider these writers "West Indian".
  West Indian literature ranges over subjects and themes as wide as those of any other "national" literature, but in general many West Indian writers share a special concern with questions of identity, ethnicity, and language that rise out of the Caribbean historical experience.
  One unique and pervasive characteristic of Caribbean literature is the use of "dialect" forms of the national language, often termed creole. The various local variations in the language adopted from the colonial powers such as Britain, Spain, Portugal, France and the Netherlands, have been modified over the years within each country and each has developed a blend that is unique to their country. Many Caribbean authors in their writing switch liberally between the local variation – now commonly termed nation language – and the standard form of the language. Two West Indian writers have won the Nobel Prize in Literature: Derek Walcott (1992), born in St. Lucia, resident mostly in Trinidad during the 1960s and '70s, and partly in the United States since then; and V. S. Naipaul, born in Trinidad and resident in the United Kingdom since the 1950. (Saint-John Perse, who won the Nobel Prize in 1960, was born in the French territory of Guadeloupe.)
  Other notable names in (anglophone) Caribbean literature have included Earl Lovelace, Austin Clarke, Claude McKay, Orlando Patterson, Andrew Salkey, Edward Kamau Brathwaite (who was born in Barbados and has lived in Ghana and Jamaica), Linton Kwesi Johnson, and Michelle Cliff. In more recent times, a number of literary voices have emerged from the Caribbean as well as the Caribbean diaspora, including Kittitian Caryl Phillips (who has lived in the UK since one month of
caption: Actress Pauline Henriques and writer Samuel Selvon reading a story on BBC's Caribbean Voices 1952
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