This chapter examines Caribbean writing of the 1950s–1960s in relation to modernism as a concept, movement, and literary practice. Based on writing by Caribbean intellectuals, including C. L. R. James, George Lamming, Wilson Harris, and Édouard Glissant, and building on work by critics Simon Gikandi, Charles Pollard, Mary Lou Emery, Maria Cristina Fumagali, and others, it identifies a project of questioning modernism that challenged Eurocentric notions of Enlightenment modernity while contributing to modernist aesthetics. Further, it suggests that Caribbean writers of that period anticipated and currently inspire revisions of mainstream modernist studies. Critical reassessments of the Windrush generation, including feminist critiques of canon formation (J. Dillon Brown, Peter Kalliney, Faith Smith, Leah Rosenberg, and Alison Donnell), help support the essay’s argument for the importance of earlier decades of Caribbean modernism along with translinguistic philosophical and artistic influences. Specific readings focus on interactions among literary and visual arts – especially in the work of Lamming, Harris, Kamau Brathwaite, Roger Mais, and Aubrey Williams. In the writing of Harris, Brathwaite, and Jean Rhys, the essay locates ‘tropes of brokenness’ as ground for new concepts of the individual, new portrayals of vision, and a Caribbean modernist poetics based on creolized and indigenous arts.

The globalizing and interconnecting effects of technology in the twenty-first century have had a crucial impact on the development of Caribbean literary culture and the reconfiguration of its audiences. Caribbean writing and literary criticism are reaching wider audiences within the region and beyond via myriad digital platforms. Through social media, blogs, online journals, digital archives and the websites of publishing houses and festivals, the news and content of Caribbean literary work has become more accessible. Examining networks of ‘digital yards’, a concept built on Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s work, this essay surveys twenty-first century forms of digital Caribbean literary production while considering the continuities that remain between earlier forms of representation and Caribbean literary culture online today.

This essay charts key aspects of the development of canonical literary criticism in the English-speaking Caribbean. It argues that a full understanding of the ways in which proliferating critical statements coalesced into a major body of evaluative work across the decades, from the 1930s through the 1970s, needs to account for the diverse and intersecting communicative platforms the criticism relied upon. The burgeoning criticism responded to the blossoming of anglophone Caribbean literature in the post World War II period via print venues such as Bim in Barbados, Kyk-over-al in Guyana, and the Jamaica Journal and Caribbean Quarterly in Jamaica. In addition, during the decades of the 1940s and 1950s, the BBC literary radio programme Caribbean Voices functioned as a platform for the production and dissemination of Caribbean literary and cultural criticism. As such, the development of the critical canon in the anglophone Caribbean is not only the story of intersecting and mutually supportive media, print and electronic, but also the story of transatlantic knowledge flows. The essay therefore proposes that the intersection of print and electronic media and the robust transatlantic knowledge flows call into question, in the contemporary moment, any enduring distinction between those putative binaries that energized so many of the critical arguments of the period, viz. home vs. exile, oral vs. scribal, and folk criticism vs. cosmopolitan practice.

Language has long been acknowledged as a site of contestation in the Creole-anglophone Caribbean. English has, traditionally, been the exclusive language of both literary text and critical analysis. Conversely, the various Creoles of the Caribbean are not generally recognized as languages, let alone appropriate modes of literary expression. Debates about this contentious issue became a major flashpoint in the 1950s with the publication of V. S. Reid’s New Day (1949) and Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1953) in which Creole-speaking characters take centre stage. These debates gathered impetus in the 1970s with the publication of Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack, Monkey, Mervyn Morris’ positioning of Louise Bennett as a ‘serious’ writer following the publication of her volume Jamaica Labrish (1966), and Kamau Brathwaite’s 1970 establishment of the journal Savacou, all of which engaged the vernacular as a literary language. The growing influence of sociopolitical eruptions such as the Rastafari movement and Black Power also signified influential developments in the thinking about language. Through an examination of poetry and prose, the chapter assesses the significance of the historical debates about language beginning in the eighteenth century and concluding with a brief discussion of the legacy of these contestations in the present.

Histories of West Indian writing have traditionally put particular focus on the migration of a group of writers often labelled in shorthand as the Windrush generation, after the 1948 arrival of the Empire Windrush that began the post-World War II arrival of large amounts of Caribbean people in Britain. Finding opportunities in the British literary scene – most notably, with the BBC’s Caribbean Voices programme – these migrant writers were able to establish themselves, promote each other, and reach a wide audience, even as their encounter with British racism intensified their anticolonial vision. These writers’ experience was frequently refracted through the idea of exile, which in the Caribbean critical imaginary came to define the writers of the period. This chapter takes up an examination of this remarkably prolific and influential generation of anglophone Caribbean writers, with particular focus on the extent to which exile is an adequate concept for thinking about their writing. It discusses the different levels of geographical and cultural identification with which these writers grappled, remarking the process by which interacting with Caribbean people from throughout the region in Britain helped foster a West Indian cultural identity beyond any single island, as well as the tension between regionalism and localized nationalism that resulted. Going further, it will also illustrate the sense of an emergent ‘rooting’ of the Caribbean in Britain, a process that was self-consciously addressed in the writing of many of these authors and subsequently formalized in the formation of alternative publishing and cultural institutions in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s. The chapter provides readings of works by Kamau Brathwaite, George Lamming, V. S. Naipaul, Andrew Salkey, and Samuel Selvon, and puts them into context with the much larger population of less celebrated writers, as well as Caribbean literary figures who came to England before the post-World War II period of mass migration. In illustrating the complexity of the Windrush writers’ engagements with notions of home, citizenship, belonging, and cultural ownership, the essay argues that a more fluid, multi-directional understanding of the concept of exile is necessary in order for the era’s important contributions, not just to the project of anticolonial nationalism, but also to the nascent discourses of diaspora and black Britishness, to be properly understood.

The routes of Caribbean interactions with Africa during the 1950s and 1960s were several and varied: not only did Africa appear in the literature as forms and interrogations of an ideological homeland, but African and Caribbean writers met on European soil, exchanged ideas in conversations with each other, and became part of literary projects fostered through European universities and publishers. During this period, many writers and scholars from across the Caribbean region moved to the newly independent African countries, and engaged with the cultures in their writing and professional and personal lives. Conversely, many African writers turned to the Caribbean for models of how to engage with the cultures of colonialism and their afterlife. This chapter examines the pilgrimage of identity and diaspora enacted through the African–Caribbean connection, the new literary movements that it generated, as well as the shared project of political and cultural decolonization.

Co-founders Edward Kamau Brathwaite, John La Rose, and Andrew Salkey envisaged the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) as a forum for engaging with the work of Caribbean writers and artists in the UK, and for stimulating interest among British people. While well-established writers and artists including C. L. R. James, Wilson Harris, and Aubrey Williams were involved from the outset, younger writers and artists followed later. Although CAM existed formally only for six years (1966–1972), public symposia, conferences, as well as its newsletter and periodical ensured CAM was pivotal in defining Caribbean and black British aesthetics. It operated within and at times strained against the institutions that shaped the politics of cultural life in Britain. CAM anticipated and contributed to the forging of black British self-representation and collective identity, exemplifying processes that were anchored in frameworks of black Atlantic radicalism, and, in many cases, in a revolutionary politics of solidarity. It contributed significantly to the growth of alliances which cut across cultural, ethnic, and geographical divides, influencing cultural theorists like Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy.