Papers by Benedicte Ledent
Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2018
New Centennial Review, 2022
The massacre of the Zong in 1781, during which slavers threw 132 captive Africans overboard, and ... more The massacre of the Zong in 1781, during which slavers threw 132 captive Africans overboard, and the historical ramifications of such a horrendous event, have exerted a fascination on the authors of the anglophone Caribbean diaspora. This essay deals with the publication in 2020 of two fictional literary texts covering related grounds: Anglo-Jamaican Winsome Pinnock’s play Rockets and Blue Lights and Trinidadian Lawrence Scott’s novel Dangerous Freedom.
What I want to show in this essay is that beyond their many differences in tone, scope, and genre, Pinnock’s and Scott’s books, coming as they do in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and the Windrush scandal, display epistemological commonalities that are bound to the time of their release, at least in the way they can be read by contemporary readers. Like the fictionalizations of the Zong that came before them, Pinnock’s and Scott’s works contribute to the understanding of the British involvement in the slave trade and slavery by staging historical and visual archives. They also demonstrate the centrality of such documents in any attempt to draw a nuanced picture of the history of the nation, as fragmentary as these archives might be.
Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2020
Journal of West Indian Literature, 2021
Starting from the idea that radio drama is a generic hinterland, this essay concentrates on one o... more Starting from the idea that radio drama is a generic hinterland, this essay concentrates on one of Phillips’s radio plays, Hotel Cristobel, which was broadcast in 2005 but started as a stage play back in the 1990s. As its title suggests, this play is set in a Caribbean hotel and explores the neo-colonial interactions between three characters, who all come with significant historical baggage. This essay provides a reading of this dramatic text, relying on the script found in the author’s archives held at the Beinecke Library (Yale University), but also on different unpublished documents available there.
Caribbean Literary Heritage
Journal of West Indian Literature, 2020
This essay takes a closer look at some of Evelyn O’Callaghan’s scholarly achievements, beyond her... more This essay takes a closer look at some of Evelyn O’Callaghan’s scholarly achievements, beyond her overarching commitment to the work of Caribbean women writers. It particularly focuses on her early publication The Earliest Patriots, her active and generous involvement in various collaborative endeavours, and finally her long-lasting concern for the way writers from the Caribbean and its diaspora have represented ‘madness’ in their work. All these areas of interest confirm Evelyn’s impressive caliber as a human being and academic while demonstrating once again that her scholarship has of all times been “breaking historical and critical silences”.
The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing, 2020
Black and Asian British writing can be formalized as diaspora literatures with links to ancestral... more Black and Asian British writing can be formalized as diaspora literatures with links to ancestral homelands on the subcontinent, in Africa and in the Caribbean; interrogations of and inscriptions on a matrix of British cultures are another thematic and aesthetic concern of black and Asian British writing. Beyond this binary framework, though, a range of writers roam more widely, exploring different pathways: VS Naipaul’s interest in Africa or North America is a case in point, as are Caryl Phillips’s European travelogues or Shiva Naipaul’s travel writing and his essays collected in Unfinished Journey (1986). Bernardine Evaristo’s Lara explores her Brazilian, Nigerian, Irish and German ancestry whilst Andrew Salkey recounts his travels to Guyana in Georgetown Journal (1972) and celebrates placelessness in his Anancy Traveller (1992). This chapter thus focuses on writing which does not give primacy to the exploration of ancestral or postcolonial origins, but reaches out beyond this well-established binary framework of homes past and present.
Representing the Exotic and the Familiar, 2019
Caribbean literature is replete with migrant figures that are viewed when they go abroad as bot... more Caribbean literature is replete with migrant figures that are viewed when they go abroad as both exotic and mad, the apparent otherness of their behaviour or life choices being perceived in the west as evidence of some form of mental imbalance. Victims of what Graham Huggan has called “a particular mode of aesthetic perception”, these characters distinguish themselves by their cultural difference which might inspire initial fascination, yet results in most cases in exploitative commodification often followed by radical rejection. The iconic example of such an occurrence is of course Antoinette, aka Bertha Mason, in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1960), the white creole who ends up locked up in the attic of Thornfield Hall, dreams of setting fire to it and is thought to eventually do so before jumping to her death. The first part of this essay analyses similar stories of exoticization followed by marginalisation written by West Indian authors and examines to what extent their characters manage to subvert their so-called exoticism to take advantage of it and achieve empowerment, however ambiguous this might turn out to be -- as it is the case for Antoinette. The texts that I focus on are Dionne Brand’s “Blossom, Priestess of Oya, Goddess of Winds, Storms, and Waterfalls” (1988) and Jean Rhys’s “Let Them Call It Jazz” (1962), two short stories in which the writers give us access to the characters’ allegedly deranged minds and thereby contribute to turning their exotic status on its head. The second part of this essay focuses on an even more radical way of addressing the assumed mental difference of the migrant other through a reading of Caryl Phillips’s The Lost Child (2015), a novel which could be said to indigenize the figure of the mad exotic. This novel indeed concentrates on a deeply depressive English woman, who nevertheless bears an intriguing resemblance with the two Rhys protagonists mentioned above. I will argue that by conflating the figure of the mad exotic migrant with that of the depressed and disturbed English native Phillips not only interrogates the process of exoticization of the migrant other but also generates a form of empathetic familiarization with otherness that undermines any attempt to establish divisive categories and is ultimately a source of empowerment for the characters and the readers.
Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2020
In this introduction to the special issue on “Illuminating Lives: The Biographical Impulse in Pos... more In this introduction to the special issue on “Illuminating Lives: The Biographical Impulse in Postcolonial Literatures”, we start by situating the genre of biographical fiction, which has become increasingly popular in postcolonial literatures and beyond, in relation to more “traditional” nonfictional biography. We then examine how postcolonial biofiction might be distinguished from its postmodern avatar, and we tentatively circumscribe some of the tendencies that appear to cluster more systematically in postcolonial biofiction than in other types of writings: the focus on individuals — including artist figures — either forgotten or marginalized in traditional history; the use of the biofictional as a veritable mode of knowledge that allows writers and their critics to explore the philosophical implications of examining human trajectories; and the presence of narrative fragmentation, which often problematizes the possibility of ever fully apprehending an individual life.
Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature: On the Edge (Palgrave), 2018
Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2018
Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2018
Between 1984 and 2016 Caryl Phillips wrote nine radio plays which
were all broadcast on the BBC. ... more Between 1984 and 2016 Caryl Phillips wrote nine radio plays which
were all broadcast on the BBC. Meant for a different circuit of
communication than his novels, essays and published stage plays,
Phillips’s radio plays might be dismissed as minor writing, yet they
constitute a fascinating, under-investigated body of texts which are
worth exploring alongside the rest of his work. Thematically, Phillips’s
radio drama covers similar ground to his fiction and essays. Starting
from this sense of familiarity, this article examines the formal and
communicative specificities at play in Phillips’s contributions to the
radio drama genre. Focusing on two radio plays entitled Crossing the
River (1985) and A Kind of Home: James Baldwin in Paris (2004), this
piece discusses which features of this marginal genre inform Phillips’s
radio-dramatic characterization of protagonists with complex
identities, but also, more generally, how these aspects infuse his
formally experimental fiction.
Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 2017
Starting from the vocal nature of Crossing the River, the article looks at Caryl Phillips's archi... more Starting from the vocal nature of Crossing the River, the article looks at Caryl Phillips's archives housed at the Beinecke Library and thereby attempts to retrieve the voices that did not make it into the book, but which are nonetheless important pieces in the writers's imaginative universe. This article will refer to three thematically linked radio plays as well as an early draft of the third section of the 1993 novel.
Ariel, 2017
Through a reading of Caryl Phillips’ most recent
novel, The Lost Child (2015), this article exami... more Through a reading of Caryl Phillips’ most recent
novel, The Lost Child (2015), this article examines a paradox at
the heart of Phillips’ work: the tension between the ruptures and
continuities brought about by the historical encounter of north
and south (specifically, eighteenth-century northern Britain and
the Caribbean). The novel focuses on the lot of the lost children
who were born in the wake of such a fateful meeting and whose
narratives are often missing from the literary and historical records
even as their ghostly traces haunt today’s British society and indeed
the British literary canon. Yet, as this essay demonstrates, the family
disruptions and sense of loss, a legacy of slavery that mars the lives
of the characters, are compensated at the fictional level by a form
of literary parenthood. The novel relies on a fruitful intertextual
conversation with other novels that, like The Lost Child, invest in
the narrative reclamation of absent stories, the unvoiced accounts
of orphans and lost, stolen, or denied children of the Empire.
These texts include Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) as
well as Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and some of Phillips’
earlier works, notably Cambridge (1991).
The Cross-Cultural Legacy: Critical and Creative Writings in Memory of Hena Maes-Jelinek, ed. by Gordon Collier, Geoffery V. Davis, Marc Delrez and Bénédicte Ledent, pp. 201-218, 2017
The Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Writing, 1945-2010, ed. by Deirdre Osborne, pp. 241-255., 2016
New Soundings in Postcolonial Writing. Critical and Creative Contours, ed. by Janet Wilson and Chris Ringrose, 2016
This essay examines the role of language in Zadie Smith's White Teeth (2000) and Andrea Levy's Sm... more This essay examines the role of language in Zadie Smith's White Teeth (2000) and Andrea Levy's Small Island (2004), arguing that English in its various forms not only partakes in the shaping of postcolonial human relations but also helps deconstruct rigid notions of identity, including that of Englishness. Nevertheless the two novels differ in certain respects: in Small Island Englishness emerges from a process of occasionally painful mutual adaptation and compromise, while in White Teeth Smith goes further in redefining Englishness as the expression of the human diversity at the heart of contemporary London.
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Papers by Benedicte Ledent
What I want to show in this essay is that beyond their many differences in tone, scope, and genre, Pinnock’s and Scott’s books, coming as they do in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and the Windrush scandal, display epistemological commonalities that are bound to the time of their release, at least in the way they can be read by contemporary readers. Like the fictionalizations of the Zong that came before them, Pinnock’s and Scott’s works contribute to the understanding of the British involvement in the slave trade and slavery by staging historical and visual archives. They also demonstrate the centrality of such documents in any attempt to draw a nuanced picture of the history of the nation, as fragmentary as these archives might be.
//www.facebook.com/Caribbean-Literary-Heritage-1491063070954498/, 4th August 2020
were all broadcast on the BBC. Meant for a different circuit of
communication than his novels, essays and published stage plays,
Phillips’s radio plays might be dismissed as minor writing, yet they
constitute a fascinating, under-investigated body of texts which are
worth exploring alongside the rest of his work. Thematically, Phillips’s
radio drama covers similar ground to his fiction and essays. Starting
from this sense of familiarity, this article examines the formal and
communicative specificities at play in Phillips’s contributions to the
radio drama genre. Focusing on two radio plays entitled Crossing the
River (1985) and A Kind of Home: James Baldwin in Paris (2004), this
piece discusses which features of this marginal genre inform Phillips’s
radio-dramatic characterization of protagonists with complex
identities, but also, more generally, how these aspects infuse his
formally experimental fiction.
novel, The Lost Child (2015), this article examines a paradox at
the heart of Phillips’ work: the tension between the ruptures and
continuities brought about by the historical encounter of north
and south (specifically, eighteenth-century northern Britain and
the Caribbean). The novel focuses on the lot of the lost children
who were born in the wake of such a fateful meeting and whose
narratives are often missing from the literary and historical records
even as their ghostly traces haunt today’s British society and indeed
the British literary canon. Yet, as this essay demonstrates, the family
disruptions and sense of loss, a legacy of slavery that mars the lives
of the characters, are compensated at the fictional level by a form
of literary parenthood. The novel relies on a fruitful intertextual
conversation with other novels that, like The Lost Child, invest in
the narrative reclamation of absent stories, the unvoiced accounts
of orphans and lost, stolen, or denied children of the Empire.
These texts include Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) as
well as Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and some of Phillips’
earlier works, notably Cambridge (1991).
What I want to show in this essay is that beyond their many differences in tone, scope, and genre, Pinnock’s and Scott’s books, coming as they do in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and the Windrush scandal, display epistemological commonalities that are bound to the time of their release, at least in the way they can be read by contemporary readers. Like the fictionalizations of the Zong that came before them, Pinnock’s and Scott’s works contribute to the understanding of the British involvement in the slave trade and slavery by staging historical and visual archives. They also demonstrate the centrality of such documents in any attempt to draw a nuanced picture of the history of the nation, as fragmentary as these archives might be.
//www.facebook.com/Caribbean-Literary-Heritage-1491063070954498/, 4th August 2020
were all broadcast on the BBC. Meant for a different circuit of
communication than his novels, essays and published stage plays,
Phillips’s radio plays might be dismissed as minor writing, yet they
constitute a fascinating, under-investigated body of texts which are
worth exploring alongside the rest of his work. Thematically, Phillips’s
radio drama covers similar ground to his fiction and essays. Starting
from this sense of familiarity, this article examines the formal and
communicative specificities at play in Phillips’s contributions to the
radio drama genre. Focusing on two radio plays entitled Crossing the
River (1985) and A Kind of Home: James Baldwin in Paris (2004), this
piece discusses which features of this marginal genre inform Phillips’s
radio-dramatic characterization of protagonists with complex
identities, but also, more generally, how these aspects infuse his
formally experimental fiction.
novel, The Lost Child (2015), this article examines a paradox at
the heart of Phillips’ work: the tension between the ruptures and
continuities brought about by the historical encounter of north
and south (specifically, eighteenth-century northern Britain and
the Caribbean). The novel focuses on the lot of the lost children
who were born in the wake of such a fateful meeting and whose
narratives are often missing from the literary and historical records
even as their ghostly traces haunt today’s British society and indeed
the British literary canon. Yet, as this essay demonstrates, the family
disruptions and sense of loss, a legacy of slavery that mars the lives
of the characters, are compensated at the fictional level by a form
of literary parenthood. The novel relies on a fruitful intertextual
conversation with other novels that, like The Lost Child, invest in
the narrative reclamation of absent stories, the unvoiced accounts
of orphans and lost, stolen, or denied children of the Empire.
These texts include Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) as
well as Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and some of Phillips’
earlier works, notably Cambridge (1991).
Contributors are: Gordon Collier, Tim Cribb, Fred D'Aguiar, Geoffrey V. Davis, Jeanne Delbaere, Marc Delrez, Jean–Pierre Durix, Wilson Harris, Dominique Hecq, Marie Herbillon, Louis James, Karen King–Aribisala, Bénédicte Ledent, Christine Levecq, Alecia McKenzie, Carine Mardorossian, Peter H. Marsden, Alistair Niven, Annalisa Oboe, Britta Olinder, Christine Pagnoulle, Caryl Phillips, Lawrence Scott, Stephanos Stephanides, Klaus Stuckert, Peter O. Stummer, Petra Tournay–Theodotou, Daria Tunca, Cynthia vanden Driesen, Janet Wilson.
Contributors:
Roberto del Valle Alcalá, University of Alcalá * Lee Easton, Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning * Odile Ferly, Clark University * Kelly Hewson, Mount Royal University * Isabel Hoving, Leiden University * Wendy Knepper, Brunel University * Carine Mardorossian, University at Buffalo, SUNY * Shani Mootoo * Michael Niblett, University of Warwick * Kerstin Oloff, Durham University * Lizabeth Paravisini, Vassar College * Mayra Santos-Febres, University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras * Paula Sato, Kent State University * Lawrence Scott * Karina Smith, Victoria University * Roberto Strongman, University of California, Santa Barbara * Chantal Zabus, University of Paris 13
"
The twenty-six contributions offered here, including two by Phillips himself, address the fundamental issues that have preoccupied the writer in his now three-decades-long career – the enduring legacy of history, the intricate workings of identity, and the pervasive role of race, class, and gender in societies worldwide.
Most of Phillips’s writing is covered here, in essays that approach it from various thematic and interpretative angles. These include the interplay of fact and fiction, Phillips’s sometimes ambiguous literary affiliations, his long-standing interest in the black and Jewish diasporas, his exploration of Britain and its ‘Others’, and his recurrent use of motifs such as masking and concealment.
Writing in the Key of Life testifies to the vitality of Phillipsian scholarship and confirms the significance of an artist whose concerns, at once universal and topical, find particular resonance with the state of the world at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Contributors: Thomas Bonnici, Fatim Boutros, Gordon Collier, Sandra Courtman, Stef Craps, Alessandra Di Maio, Malik Ferdinand, Cindy Gabrielle, Lucie Gillet, Dave Gunning, Tsunehiko Kato, Wendy Knepper, Bénédicte Ledent, John McLeod, Peter H. Marsden, Joan Miller Powell, Imen Najar, Caryl Phillips, Renée Schatteman, Kirpal Singh, Petra Tournay–Theodotou, Chika Unigwe, Itala Vivan, Abigail Ward, Louise Yelin
Dans ce collectif bilingue, le concept de ‘Guerrier de l’imaginaire’ tel que défini par Patrick Chamoiseau est illustré par un corpus de textes variés. Plusieurs des articles en français engagent directement le cycle romanesque de l’auteur martiniquais, d’autres étendent l’interrogation de la fonction de l’auteur caribéen à l’écriture glissantienne, maximinienne et zobélienne. Études en anglais portent sur des écrivains dont le renom n’est plus à faire (Dionne Brand, Edwidge Danticat, Wilson Harris, Jamaica Kincaid, Caryl Phillips, Derek Walcott) mais donnent aussi la parole à des auteurs jusqu’à présent moins étudiés (Robert Antoni, Albert Helman). Enfin, quelques-unes des contributions portent sur d’autres ‘terrains de lutte’, comme la musique afro-brésilienne, le cinéma, ou la poésie militante de Mutabaruka. L’ensemble témoigne d’un imaginaire étonnamment confluant, au-delà de la ‘balkanisation’ de l’archipel caribéen.
Writers discussed: Lalithambika Antherjanam; Ayi Kwei Armah; J.M. Coetzee; Tsitsi Dangarembga; Helen Darville; Lauris Edmond; Buchi Emecheta; Yvonne du Fresne; Hiromi Goto; Patricia Grace; Rodney Hall; Joy Harjo; Bessie Head; Gordon Henry Jr.; Christopher Hope; Ruth Prawer Jhabvala; Hanif Kureishi; Keri Hulme, Lee Kok Liang; Bill Manhire; Zakes Mda; Mike Nicol; Michael Ondaatje; Alan Paton; Ravinder Randhawa; Wendy Rose; Salman Rushdie; Sipho Sepamla; Atima Srivastava; Meera Syal; Marlene van Niekerk; Yvonne Vera; Fred Wah
Contributions by Ken Arvidson; Thomas Brückner; David Callahan; Eleonora Chiavetta; Marc Colavincenzo; Gordon Collier; John Douthwaite; Dorothy Driver; Claudia Duppé; Robert Fraser; Anne Fuchs; John Gamgee; D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke; Konrad Gross; Bernd Herzogenrath; Susanne Hilf; Clara A.B. Joseph; Jaroslav Kušnír; Chantal Kwast–Greff; M.Z. Malaba; Sigrun Meinig; Michael Meyer; Mike Nicol; Obododimma Oha; Vincent O’Sullivan; Judith Dell Panny; Mike Petry; Jochen Petzold; Norbert H. Platz; Malcolm Purkey; Stéphanie Ravillon; Anne Holden Rønning; Richard Samin; Cecile Sandten; Nicole Schröder; Joseph Swann; André Viola; Christine Vogt–William; Bernard Wilson; Janet Wilson; Brian Worsfold.
Creative writing by Katherine Gallagher; Peter Goldsworthy; Syd Harrex; Mike Nicol
Contributors:
Roberto del Valle Alcalá, University of Alcalá * Lee Easton, Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning * Odile Ferly, Clark University * Kelly Hewson, Mount Royal University * Isabel Hoving, Leiden University * Wendy Knepper, Brunel University * Carine Mardorossian, University at Buffalo, SUNY * Shani Mootoo * Michael Niblett, University of Warwick * Kerstin Oloff, Durham University * Lizabeth Paravisini, Vassar College * Mayra Santos-Febres, University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras * Paula Sato, Kent State University * Lawrence Scott * Karina Smith, Victoria University * Roberto Strongman, University of California, Santa Barbara * Chantal Zabus, University of Paris 13