Mixed Race Studies

Beyond Windrush: Rethinking Postwar Anglophone Caribbean Literature

University Press of Mississippi
2015-07-10
234 pages
1 b&w illustration, 3 maps, introduction, epilogue, index
6 x 9 inches
Hardcover ISBN:9781628464757

Edited by:

Dillon Brown, Associate Professor of English and African and African American
Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri

Leah Reade Rosenberg, Associate Professor of English
University of Florida

A challenge to the primacy of the Windrush generation as the sole founders of Caribbean literature

Contributors: Edward Baugh, Michael Bucknor, Raphael Dalleo, Alison Donnell, Nadia Ellis, Donette Francis, Glyne Griffith, Kate Houlden, Evelyn O’Callaghan, Lisa Outar, Atreyee Phukan, Kim Robinson-Walcott, Faith Smith, and Michelle Stephens

This edited collection challenges a long sacrosanct paradigm. Since the establishment of Caribbean literary studies, scholars have exalted an elite cohort of émigré novelists based in postwar London, a group often referred to as “the Windrush writers” in tribute to the SS Empire Windrush, whose 1948 voyage from Jamaica inaugurated large-scale Caribbean migration to London. In critical accounts this group is typically reduced to the canonical troika of V. S. Naipaul, George Lamming, and Sam Selvon, effectively treating these three authors as the tradition’s founding fathers. These “founders” have been properly celebrated for producing a complex, anticolonial, nationalist literature. However, their canonization has obscured the great diversity of postwar Caribbean writers, producing an enduring but narrow definition of West Indian literature.

Beyond Windrush stands out as the first book to reexamine and redefine the writing of this crucial era. Its fourteen original essays make clear that in the 1950s there was already a wide spectrum of West Indian men and women—Afro-Caribbean, Indo-Caribbean, and white-creole—who were writing, publishing, and even painting. Many lived in the Caribbean and North America, rather than London. Moreover, these writers addressed subjects overlooked in the more conventionally conceived canon, including topics such as queer sexuality and the environment. This collection offers new readings of canonical authors (Lamming, Roger Mais, and Andrew Salkey); hitherto marginalized authors (Ismith Khan, Elma Napier, and John Hearne); and commonly ignored genres (memoir, short stories, and journalism).

Zadie Smith: Critical Essays

Peter Lang Publishing Group
March 2008
221 pages
Paparback ISBN: 9978-0-8204-8806-6

Edited by:

Tracey L. Walters, Associate Professor of Literature
Stony Brook University

Zadie Smith: Critical Essays is a timely collection of critical articles examining how Zadie Smith‘s novels and short stories interrogate race, postcolonialism, and identity. Essays explore the various ways Smith approaches issues of race, either by deconstructing notions of race or interrogating the complexity of biracial identity; and how Smith takes on contemporary debates concerning notions of Britishness, Englishness, and Black Britishness. Some essays also consider the shifting identities adopted by those who identify with both British and West Indian, South Asian, or East Asian ancestry. Other essays explore Smith’s contemporary postcolonial approach to Britain’s colonial legacy, and the difference between how immigrants and first-generation British-born children deal with cultural alienation and displacement. This thought-provoking collection is a much-needed critical tool for students and researchers in both contemporary British literature and Diasporic literature and culture.

Table of Contents

• Tracey L. Walters: Introduction
• Matthew Paproth: The Flipping Coin: The Modernist and Postmodernist Zadie Smith
• Ulka Anjaria: On Beauty and Being Postcolonial: Aesthetics and Form in Zadie Smith
• Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga: The Impossible Self and the Poetics of the Urban Hyperreal in Zadie Smith’s “The Autograph Man”
• Maeve Tynan: “Only Connect”: Intertextuality and Identity in Zadie Smith’s “On Beauty”
• Raphael Dalleo: Colonization in Reverse: “White Teeth” as Caribbean Novel
• Susan Alice Fischer: “Gimme Shelter”: Zadie Smith’s “On Beauty”
• Tracey L. Walters: Still Mammies and Hos: Stereotypical Images of Black Women in Zadie Smith’s Novels
• Sharon Raynor: From the Dispossessed to the Decolonized: From Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners to Zadie Smith’s “Hanwell in Hell”
• Lexi Stuckey: Red and Yellow, Black and White: Color-Blindness as Disillusionment in Zadie Smith’s “Hanwell in Hell”
• Kris Knauer: The Root Canals of Zadie Smith: London’s Intergenerational Adaptation
• Z. Esra Mirze: Fundamental Differences in Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth”
• Katarzyna Jakubiak: Simulated Optimism: The International Marketing of “White Teeth”