Literary criticism index

Articles are arranged chronologically, with most recent pieces first. Return to main subject index here.

Original critical essays

Homme du tout-monde, by J. Michael Dash (on the career and oeuvre of Édouard Glissant, 1928–2011), January 2011

Create dangerously, by Edwidge Danticat (on the courage to write and read in dangerous times; an excerpt from her new book), September 2010

Holding the strain, by Mervyn Morris (on the life and poetic career of Wayne Brown), September 2010

Travellin’ woman, by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro (on Paule Marshall’s coming of age as told in her novel Brown Girl, Brownstones and her memoir Triangular Road), May 2010

Prosimetrum, by Fred D’Aguiar (on the elasticity of space and time in Wilson Harris’s fiction), February 2009

“Every poem is incomplete”, by Martin Carter (selections from Carter’s previously unpublished poetry notebooks, introduced by Rupert Roopnaraine), November 2008

The texture of fiction, by Kei Miller (on the relationship between reality and fiction in the Caribbean), August 2008

In praise of Colly, by Edward Baugh (essay on Bim editor Frank Collymore and his relationships with numerous West Indian writers, including George Lamming and Derek Walcott), May 2008

Final return, by Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw and J. Michael Dash (tributes to Aimé Césaire, 1913–2008, assessing his place in Caribbean literature), May 2008

Literature from where I stand, or rather sit; no, make that stand . . ., by Kei Miller (on distinctions between “slam” and more formal modes of poetry), February 2008

Being me, by Tobias S. Buckell (on Caribbean identity in speculative fiction), February 2008

Worthless women, by Marlon James (on Jean Rhys and her women characters), August 2007

To make you see, by Garnette Cadogan (on V.S. Naipaul’s non-fiction), August 2007

Laureate of nowhere, by Laurence Breiner (on Eric Roach), November 2006

The truth of craft, by Stewart Brown (on Martin Carter’s art and legacy), February 2006

Still news, by Nicholas Laughlin (on the newspaper column as a Trinidadian literary form), February 2006


Reviews of books on individual authors

“I am looking for a hero”, by F.S.J. Ledgister (review of John Hearne’s Life and Fiction: A Critical Biographical Study, by Shivaun Hearne), November 2013

Cuba libre, by David Iaconangelo (review of The Cubalogues: Beat Writers in Revolutionary Havana, by Todd F. Tietchen), January 2012

Culture matters, by Aaron Kamugisha (review of C.L.R. James and the Study of Culture, by Andrew Smith), March 2011

Kaleidoscope man, by Malachi McIntosh (review of Denis Williams: A Life in Works, ed. Charlotte Williams and Evelyn A. Williams, and Other Leopards and The Third Temptation, by Denis Williams), November 2010

Another modernity, by Gavin O’Toole (review of Translating Empire: José Martí, Migrant Latino Subjects, and American Modernities, by Laura Lomas), May 2009

Home and away, by Rhoda Bharath (review of Caribbean Literature After Independence: The Case of Earl Lovelace, ed. Bill Schwartz, and A Place in the World: Essays and Tributes in Honour of Earl Lovelace at 70, ed. Funso Aiyejina), February 2009

On broken ground, by F.S. J. Ledgister (review of Caribbean Culture: Soundings on Kamau Brathwaite, ed. Annie Paul), February 2009

The contender, by Sharon Millar (review of Sylvester Devenish: Trinidad’s Poet, by Anthony de Verteuil), February 2009

Clocking cadence, by Vahni Capildeo (review of Black Yeats: Eric Roach and the Politics of Caribbean Poetry, by Laurence A. Breiner), August 2008

Enigma of enigmas, by Jeremy Taylor (review of Literary Occasions, by V.S. Naipaul; The Enigma of V.S. Naipaul, by Helen Hayward; V.S. Naipaul, 2nd edition, by Bruce King; and V.S. Naipaul, by Fawzia Mustafa), May 2004


Reviews of other literary studies

Windrush moderns, by Brendan de Caires (review of Migrant Modernism: Postwar London and the West Indian Novel, by J. Dillon Brown, and Commonwealth of Letters: British Literary Culture and the Emergence of Postcolonial Aesthetics, by Peter J. Kalliney), November 2015

Our America, by David Knight, Jr (review of The Purloined Islands: Caribbean-US Crosscurrents in Literature and Culture, 1880–1959, by Jeff Karem), November 2013

Necessary danger, by Brendan de Caires (review of Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, by Edwidge Danticat), January 2011

A region for itself, by F.S.J. Ledgister (review of Sovereignty of the Imagination: Conversations III, by George Lamming), September 2010

Middling passages?, by Brendan de Caires (review of Caribbean Middlebrow: Leisure Culture and the Middle Class, by Belinda Edmondson), July 2010

Curating memory, by Brendan de Caires (review of Exhibiting Slavery: The Caribbean Postmodern Novel as Museum, by Vivian Nun Halloran), May 2010

Crossing over, by Anu Lakhan (review of Transgression, Transition, and Transformation: Essays in Caribbean Culture, by Gordon Rohlehr), May 2008

What Vidia saw, by Brendan de Caires (review of A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling, by V.S. Naipaul), February 2008

Look homeward, by John T. Gilmore (review of An Intellectual History of the Caribbean, by Silvio Torres-Saillant), May 2007

Lost and found, by Carl A. Wade (review of “Look for Me All Around You”: Anglophone Caribbean Immigrants in the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Louis J. Parascandola), May 2006

A literature of our own, by John T. Gilmore (review of The West Indian Novel and Its Background, rev. ed., by Kenneth Ramchand), February 2005


Reviews of collections of literary interviews

What she said, by Kelly Baker Josephs (review of Conversations with Paule Marshall, ed. James C. Hall and Heather Hathaway), November 2011

Man in black, by Jeremy Taylor (review of Conversations with Caryl Phillips, ed. Renée T. Schatteman), May 2010