This chapter considers poetic expressions during the period of transition from the late colonial to the postcolonial public sphere. It focuses on two exemplary moments in 1943: the publication of the first issue of Focus, an anthology of work by a group of Jamaican writers gathered around the artist and editor Edna Manley, and the moment that Louise Bennett secured a weekly column for her Creole verse in the Sunday edition of the national newspaper, the Daily Gleaner. Considering these two events in the context of the dynamics of the Jamaican literary field, the chapter makes a broader argument about the print culture of literary decolonization. Where previous accounts have tended to place emphasis on the importance of the little magazines that emerged during this period, this chapter argues that it was in the daily and weekly newspapers that we see the aesthetic contests that defined the process of cultural decolonization. Bennett, in particular, was focused squarely on colonizing the colonial print culture ‘in reverse’, as she sought to carve out a decolonial public space at the very heart of the colonial public sphere.

Caribbean writing from the 1920s to the 1940s has not always received as much attention as the work published in England during the 1950s and 1960s. Close examination of this earlier period, however, illustrates that a wide range of fiction and poetry was published, much of it articulating aspects of a nationalist and anticolonialist perspective even as other projects arose from alternative historical contexts. Focusing on the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s also makes visible the generic and geographical diversity: poems, poetic anthologies, short fiction, and novels were written and published throughout the islands as well as in England and the United States. As a result, this early twentieth-century writing represents the range of contexts to which Caribbean writing responded: the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution; migration within the region and into metropolitan locations; the Harlem Renaissance; Marxism; attention to local ecologies that also critiques the spread of global capital; the rise of US imperialism in the region; the Great Depression; and the crisis of the British Empire beginning with the labour unrest of the mid-1930s. Consideration of single works and anthologies from the 1920s to the 1940s exposes the tensions between an indigenous consciousness and concepts of literary form imposed or absorbed at the junction of empire, migration, and coloniality.