Description

Emigration and Caribbean Literature is a fresh and necessary re-engagement with the generation of writers from the Caribbean Basin who journeyed to Europe to establish their names and literary reputations between and after the two World Wars. It reads across the Anglophone and Francophone traditions to take as its focus George Lamming, Mayotte Capécia, V.S. Naipaul, Aimé Césaire, Samuel Selvon, and Édouard Glissant, focusing firmly on their shared status as emigrants and the effects of their migration on the content and composition of their first works. By applying the theories of Antonio Gramsci, Pierre Bourdieu, and Pascale Casanova to readings of these authors' contexts and the content of their texts, Malachi McIntosh reveals how World War-era Caribbean writers were pushed to represent themselves as authentic spokesmen for their people.