Professor Sarah J Lawson Welsh

The Caribbean and Britain

Writing by second generation Caribbean migrants is deeply marked by issues of un/belonging to the national project and characterised by a generational shift in terms of articulating cultural affiliations and attachments to both the Caribbean and Britain. Writers engage with blackness as a political signifier and a rallying point for all non-white ethnicities in Britain that can be empowering in terms of claiming a place and identity within the experience and history of Britishness. Caribbean and black British literatures in the UK generally offer a different and revisionary perspective on British history and diasporic communities by bringing attention to the Brixton riots (Alex Wheatle’s Brixton Rock, 1999), the New Cross Massacre (LKJ’s poetry and John LaRose’s The New Cross Massacre Story) or multicultural experience in the city (Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, 2000), as well as much deeper and longer histories of a Caribbean presence in the UK which can struggle to be acknowledged. Alongside the urgency of contesting racism, these narratives also articulate intersectional identities informed by class, gender and sexuality as it is experienced within and across the UK & the Caribbean. Like diasporic literature in the US and Canada, contemporary black British literature is very much connected, conceptually and poetically, with Caribbean literature and that of the larger diaspora and therefore merits special critical attention as constitutive of it.

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Food explores the relationship between food and literature in transnational contexts, serving as both an introduction and a guide to the field in terms of defining characteristics and development. Balancing a wide-reaching view of the long histories and preoccupations of literary food studies, with attentiveness to recent developments and shifts, the volume illuminates the aesthetic, cultural, political, and intellectual diversity of the representation of food and eating in literature.

How do diasporic writers negotiate their identities through and with food? What tensions emerge between the local and the global, between the foodways of the past and of the present? How are concepts of culinary 'tradition' and 'authenticity' articulated in Caribbean cookery writing? Drawing on a rich and varied tradition of Caribbean writings, Food, Text & Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean shows how the creation of food and the creation of narrative are intimately linked cultural practices which can tell us much about each other. Historically, Caribbean writers have explored, defined and re-affirmed their different cultural, ethnic, caste, class and gender identities by writing about what, when and how they eat. Images of feeding, feasting, fasting and other food rituals and practices, as articulated in a range of Caribbean writings, constitute a powerful force of social cohesion and cultural continuity. Moreover, food is often central to the question of what it means to be Caribbean, especially in diasporic and globalized contexts. Suitable for undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars, the book offers the first study of food and writing in an Anglophone Caribbean context.

Food, Text and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean

Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Chapter One Famine, Feeding and Feasting: Slave Foods, Provision Grounds and the Planters’ Tables
Chapter Two White Writings: The Nineteenth Century
Chapter Three  Black Hunger and White Plenitude: Food and Social Order in Two Historiographic Metafictions
Chapter Four Caribbean Food, Writing and Identity
Chapter Five KitchenTalk: Caribbean Women Talk about Food 
Chapter Six Reading the Culinary Nation: Recipes Books and Barbados
Chapter Seven ‘Put Some Music in Your Food’: Caribbean Food and Diaspora
Bibliography

Black British poetry is the province of experimenting with voice and recording rhythms beyond the iambic pentameter. Not only in performance poetry and through the spoken word, but also on the page, black British poetry constitutes and preserves a sound archive of distinct linguistic varieties. In Slave Song (1984) and Coolie Odyssey (1988), David Dabydeen employs a form of Guyanese Creole in order to linguistically render and thus commemorate the experience of slaves and indentured labourers, respectively, with the earlier collection providing annotated translations into Standard English. James Berry, Louise Bennett, and Valerie Bloom adapt Jamaican Patois to celebrate Jamaican folk culture and at times to represent and record experiences and linguistic interactions in the postcolonial metropolis. Grace Nichols and John Agard use modified forms of Guyanese Creole, with Nichols frequently constructing gendered voices whilst Agard often
celebrates linguistic playfulness. The borders between linguistic varieties are by no means absolute or static, as the emergence and marked growth of ‘London Jamaican’ (Mark Sebba) indicates. Asian British writer Daljit Nagra takes liberties with English for different reasons. Rather than having recourse to established Creole languages, and blending them with Standard English, his heteroglot poems frequently emulate “Punglish”, the English of migrants whose first language is Punjabi. Whilst it is the language prestige of London Jamaican that has been significantly enhanced since the 1990s, a fact not only confirmed by linguistic research but also by its transethnic uses both in the streets and on the page, Nagra’s substantial success and the mainstream attention he receives also indicate the clout of vernacular voices in poetry. They have the potential to connect with oral traditions and cultural memories, to record linguistic varities, and to endow ‘street cred’ to authors and texts. In this chapter, these double-voiced poetic languages are also read as signs of resistance against residual monologic ideologies of Englishness.

Re-Routing the Postcolonial re-orientates and re-invigorates the field of Postcolonial Studies in line with recent trends in critical theory, reconnecting the ethical and political with the aesthetic aspect of postcolonial culture. Bringing together a group of leading and emerging intellectuals, and mapping new directions in postcolonial studies, the volume includes sections on: • New growth areas from cosmopolitan theories and the utopian to diaspora and transnationalism • New subject matters such as sexuality and queer theory, ecocriticism and postcolonialism in new locations (Eastern Europe, China) • New theoretical perspectives on globalization (fundamentalism, terror and theories of ‘affect’) Each section incorporates a clear, concise introduction, making this volume both an accessible overview of current concerns in the field whilst also an invigorating collection of scholarship for the new millennium. Contributors include: Bill Ashcroft, Anna Ball, Elleke Boehmer, Diana Brydon, Simon Gikandi, Erin Goheen Glanville, James Graham, Dorota Kołodziejczyk, Victor Li, Nadia Louar, Deborah Madsen, Jeffrey Mather, Nirmala Menon, Kaori Nagai, Jane Poyner, Robert Spencer and Patrick Williams.

The Cambridge Companion to British Poetry, 1945-2010 brings together sixteen essays that explore the full diversity of British poetry since the Second World War, a period of significant achievement in which varied styles and approaches have flourished. As a comprehensive critical, literary-historical and scholarly guide, this Companion offers not only new readings of a wide range of poets but a detailed account of the contexts in which their verse was written and received. Focusing on famous and neglected names alike, from Dylan Thomas to John Agard, leading scholars provide readers with insight into the ongoing importance and profundity of post-war poetry.

From General Introduction to Special Issue:
'Rounding out the scholarly contributions, Sarah Lawson Welsh’s work contributes
to the growing body of research concerning the culture(s) of food and taste in postcolonial and Caribbean studies. In “‘A Table of Plenty’: Representations of Food and Social Order in Caribbean Writing: Some Early Accounts, Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge, and Andrea Levy’s The Long Song,” she examines the relationship between writing and cooking in historical documents of slavery as well as neo-slave novels, considering the significance of food hierarchies and the creolisation of food cultures in Caribbean contexts. Building on Richard Wilk’s analysis of food status and respectability in Belize, she argues that both Levy and Phillips employ “narrative strategies which deliberately decentre the hegemony of the white Creole accounts upon which they draw.”4  She argues that Levy’s novel is more radical than Phillips’s in its subversive potential due to its ability to “disrupt the intertextual field”5  and realign our reading of archival sources. Bringing archival texts into dialogue with fictional sources, Lawson Welsh offers innovative readings that shed new light on the interpretation of past-present texts and practices related to food culture. She skillfully decodes subversive practices as well as calls attention to the culture of respectability that led the plantocracy to value imported foodstuffs and recipes over the (more) local and indigenous. This innovative article opens up new perspectives and reading practices in Caribbean studies through its careful analysis of the consumption of
food and narrative.'

Abstract: The Caribbean is in many ways, as Richard Wilk has shown in his 2006 study of food and globalization in a Belizean context, the perfect example of the mixing of ethnicities, cultures and culinary practices as well as a region with one of the longest histories of global connectedness and globalizing processes in relation to food. However, there have been surprisingly very few studies of the relationship between food and culture in a Caribbean context (see Higson 2008 for one valuable exception). This article builds and extends upon Wilk’s important work on food status and respectability in Belize (2006, 2008) by considering the textual representation of food, food patterns and foodways in some earlier – and crucially, in some wider - Caribbean contexts. The main focus is on the relationship between food and social order in a Caribbean plantation context and, in particular, on responses to food and social hierarchies of food status (e.g. between indigenous, naturalized or imported foods), as they are explored and mediated in a number of Caribbean and diasporic Caribbean texts contemporary to, or set in, the colonial plantation period. A related focus is the shift from food practices which perform a version of the culinary nation, constructing national identity, whether Caribbean or expatriate European, and the establishment of a more creolized identity through food. The paper acknowledges that foodways and food practices have been richly represented in and through Caribbean writing since the earliest colonial period (earlier if we include oral tradition and food practices) and across a number of different genres: plantation accounts, memoirs, fiction, poetry, essays, recipes [oral and written] and cookery writing. As such, the paper considers attitudes to food cultures and social order in a range of written sources: early traveller and planter’s accounts and two more recent literary texts: Caryl Phillips’ Cambridge (1991) and Andrea Levy’s The Long Song (2010). It is argued that the latter, as historiographic metafictions, not only draw upon some of the early sources in some interesting ways, but stage and re-present, in a more self-consciously ambivalent way, early attitudes to food and social order in a Caribbean context.

'Caribbean Food Cultures  approaches the matter of food from the perspectives of anthropology, sociology, cultural and literary studies. Its strong interdisciplinary focus provides new insights into symbolic and material food practices beyond eating, drinking, cooking, or etiquette. The contributors discuss culinary aesthetics and neo/colonial gazes on the Caribbean in literary documents, audiovisual media, and popular images. They investigate the negotiation of communities and identities through the preparation, consumption, and commodification of »authentic« food. Furthermore, the authors emphasize the influence of underlying socioeconomic power relations for the reinvention of Caribbean and Western identities in the wake of migration and transnationalism.'

Encompassing feminism, masculinities and queer theory, and drawing on film, literature, language, creative writing and digital technologies, these essays, from scholars experienced in teaching gender theory in university English programmes, offer inventive and student-focused strategies for teaching gender in the twenty-first century classroom.

"Re-Routing the Postcolonial re-orientates and re-invigorates the field of Postcolonial Studies in line with recent trends in critical theory, reconnecting the ethical and political with the aesthetic aspect of postcolonial culture.

Bringing together a group of leading and emerging intellectuals, this volume charts and challenges the diversity of postcolonial studies, including sections on:

•new directions and growth areas from performance and autobiography to diaspora and transnationalism
•new subject matters such as sexuality and queer theory, ecocriticism and discussions of areas of Europe as postcolonial spaces
•new theoretical directions such as globalization, fundamentalism, terror and theories of ‘affect’.

Each section incorporates a clear, concise introduction, making this volume both an accessible overview of the field whilst also an invigorating collection of scholarship for the new millennium.
"

"The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature is an outstanding compilation of over seventy primary and secondary texts of writing from the Caribbean. Locating key writers within a specifically Caribbean framework, the Reader  demonstrates that these singular voices have emerged not out of a cultural void or sparse literary background, but out of a wealth of literary tradition which until now was unknown or critically neglected.
Writers from 1900 to the present, both famous and less well-known, are given a voice in this remarkable anthology which encompasses poetry, short stories, essays, articles and interviews. Amongst the many represented here are:

* C.L.R. James
* George Lamming
* Jean Rhys
* Benjamin Zephaniah
* Claude McKay
* Louise Bennett
* Jamaica Kincaid
* Sylvia Wynter
* Derek Walcott
* David Dabydeen
* Grace Nichols

The Reader provides an accessible historical and cultural introduction to the writings, making this volume an ideal teaching tool as well as a fascinating collection for anyone interested in the literature of the Caribbean. "

The first full-length study of Grace Nichols's work. Rather than seeing Nichols's 'Caribbeaness' and 'Britishness' as dual affliations, simplistically opposed, it argues that Nichols's writing is more productively read in terms of a series of border-crossings. Nichols's major female protagonists are seen as epic journeyers travelling, literally and imaginatively, across different cultural and psychic landscapes. It also shows how Nichols's poetry explores the boundaries of race, class and gender as part of the lived experience of being a black woman in Britain. Specific focuses include the critical neglect of black British Woman's writing, the problems and potentialities of different feminist reading strategies, the role of rewriting history and revisioning myth in Nichols's poetry and the nature of diaspora, cultural hybridity and the complex meaning of home for the migrant writer

"In Centre of Remembrance: Memory and Caribbean Women’s Literature, Joan Anim-Addo offers an important collection of critical essays, which engages with issues of collective and individual memory of crucial significance to this corpus of writing. Among the texts explored is writing by Erna Brodber, Lorna Goodison, Georgina Herrera, Merle Hodge, Jamaica Kincaid, Michele Lacrosil, Elma Napier, Joan Riley and Olive Senior. This comprehensive anthology brings together analyses presenting multiple perspectives from scholars based in British, American, Caribbean and European universities.

It is the first major volume of essays to focus exclusively on the scope of memory in relation to this literature. Centre of Remembrance: Memory and Caribbean Women¹s Literature will be of particular interest to those concerned with developments in the field of women’s writing and specifically Caribbean women.

Contributors: Alba Ambert, Paulette Brown-Hinds, Mary Condé, Giovanna Covi, Alison Donnell, Maria Cristina Fumagalli, Beryl Gilroy, Conrad James, Paula E. Morgan, Denise deCaires Narain, Evelyn O’Callaghan, Beverley Ormerod, Sarah Lawson Welsh and M. Nourbese Philip.

"

"At the beginning of the twenty-first century it is necessary to combine into a productive programme the striving for individual emancipation and the social practice of humanism, in order to help the world survive both the ancient pitfalls of particularist terrorism and the levelling tendencies of cultural indifference engendered by the renewed imperialist arrogance of hegemonic global capital.

In this book, thirty-five scholars address and negotiate, in a spirit of learning and understanding, an exemplary variety of intercultural splits and fissures that have opened up in the English-speaking world. Their methodology can be seen to constitute a seminal field of intellectual signposts. They point out ways and means of responsibly assessing colonial predicaments and postcolonial developments in six regions shaped in the past by the British Empire and still associated today through their allegiance to the idea of a Commonwealth of Nations. They show how a new ethic of literary self-assertion, interpretative mediation and critical responsiveness can remove the deeply ingrained prejudices, silences and taboos established by discrimination against race, class and gender.
"

For the first time the Dutch-speaking regions of the Caribbean and Suriname are brought into fruitful dialogue with another major American literature, that of the anglophone Caribbean. The results are as stimulating as they are unexpected. The editors have coordinated the work of a distinguished international team of specialists.
Read separately or as a set of three volumes, the History of Literature in the Caribbean is designed to serve as the primary reference book in this area. The reader can follow the comparative evolution of a literary genre or plot the development of a set of historical problems under the appropriate heading for the English- or Dutch-speaking region. An extensive index to names and dates of authors and significant historical figures completes the volume.

Caribbean Women Writers is a collection of scholarly articles on the fiction of selected Caribbean women writers from Antigua, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica and Trinidad. It includes not only close critical analysis of texts by Erna Brodber, Dionne Brand, Zee Edgell, Jamaica Kincaid, Paule Marshall, Pauline Melville, Jean Rhys and Olive Senior, but also personal statements from the writers Merle Collins, Beryl Gilroy, Vernella Fuller and Velma Pollard.

"David Dabydeen is from the younger generation of Caribbean writers living in Britain. His work has been highly praised for its originality and imaginative depth. In this volume, leading scholars from Europe, North America and the Caribbean discuss his poetry and fiction in the context of the politics and culture of Britain and the Caribbean. These studies explore David Dabydeen's concern with the plurality of Caribbean experience, with its African, Indian, Amerindian and European roots; the dislocation of slavery and indenture; migration and the consequent divisions in the Caribbean psyche. In particular, these essays focus on Dabydeen's aesthetic practice as a consciously post-colonial writer; his exploration of the contrasts between rural creole and standard English and their different world visions; the power of language to subvert accepted realities; his use of multiple masks as ways of dealing with issues of identity and the use of destabilizing techniques in the narrative strategies he employs.

Bruce King writes in World Literature Today: 'This is the first book about David Dabydeen and the first book in a series to be devoted to British Caribbean authors, by which is meant writers born in the Caribbean but resident in England. It is an extremely useful work consisting of three interviews and nine essays on the subject’s poetry and novels, followed by a bibliography of books and articles by Dabydeen and a list of reviews of his creative work. Part of the usefulness is that the essays overlap, build on, and disagree with one another. They bring out Dabydeen’s recurring themes, autobiographical material, and the links among his scholarly publications, interviews, and creative writings. The authors know Dabydeen, and some were his students or colleagues, which is reflected in the way that what were perhaps offhand remarks are passed on as truths.'

"

"Why is the world in which we live so ruled by the idea of the nation? What effect have the newly independent nations of the last fifty years had on the old world order? Are countries in a post-imperial world the same now as they were in the time of imperialism? Not On Any Map seeks to answer these questions and explores the wide-ranging issues surrounding nationalism and postcoloniality.

The collection draws on the work of scholars and creative producers from all over the world who explore the idea of the nation in a variety of postcolonial contexts. These include a piece from Wilson Harris' work-in-progress, as well as other work on literary nationalism, media arts promotion, the use of the indigene in tourism, commercial cinema, immigration, developments in communication and technology, sport and issues affecting nations both in the former colonial centres and the ex-colonies.

Contributions by
Graham Barwell, Kate Bowles, Máire ní Fhlathúin, Wilson Harris, Paul Hyland, Declan Kiberd, Powhiri Rika-Heke, Dominic Thomas, Ravi S. Vasudeven, Sarah Lawson Welsh and Mark Williams
"

During the 1790s James Montgomery, editor of the Sheffield Iris newspaper, was twice confined to York Castle Prison on dubious charges of treason and sedition. Whilst a prisoner Montgomery composed a collection of poetry, later printed in 1797 as Prison Amusements. The collection’s stand-out poem was a two part epistle titled ‘The Pleasures on Imprisonment’. The first instalment labours Montgomery’s horror at being locked away in York Castle Prison. He soon finds that his fellow prisoners are neither dangerous criminals nor feared radicals but merely thoughtful men and women of dissenting opinion. This essay presents discrete contextual evidence for the simultaneous personification of York at the end of the 18th century as both an idealistic platform from which London government could be challenged and as a panoptical city associated with punitive surveillance and incarceration designed to protect and promote traditional government hierarchies. The essay explores the extent to which...

This chapter focuses on my experience of teaching gender theory as part of the undergraduate study of postcolonial literature. It considers some of the broader concerns of gendering the postcolonial, drawing on the specific context of teaching ‘Writing the Caribbean’, a final year English Studies module on Caribbean women’s writing at York St John University. The module has a mixed generic focus (the discourses of the tourist brochure, oral and written literature, slave narrative, plantation owner’s diaries, testimony, polemic and cultural criticism are all studied). Texts include Matthew Lewis’s Journal of a West Indian Proprietor (1834), Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place (1988), selected early twentieth-century Caribbean poetry, Grace Nichols’ I Is a Long Memoried Woman (1986), V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas (1961) and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night (1997). In commencing the module, I suggest to students that the study of postcolonial literatures might be productively complicated and interrogated by an engagement with gender theory. In turn, gender theory — specifically Western gender theories — might be usefully problematised and critiqued by literary and visual texts from postcolonial cultures.

9 Pauline Melville's Shape-Shifting Fictions Sarah Lawson Welsh Cross-cultural texts of such societies as Guyana... ... super-natural powers, including Mr Evans the Obeah man of'The Con-version of Millicent Vernon', Maisie in'The Truth is in the Clothes' and Dr Bartholomew in ...

... 222 I Come From the Nigger Yard 223 I Am No Soldier 226 ELMA NAPIER Carnival in Martinique 228 SAMUEL SELVON Waiting ... CONTENTS KAMAU BRATHWAITE Jazz and the West Indian Novel I, II and III 336 KAMAU BRATHWAITE Timehri 344 RAJKUMARI SINGH I am a ...

It is a great pleasure to open this Special Issue on Caribbean literature with an interview with the Barbadian-bom writer, Kamau Brathwaite. Brathwaite's long career arid prolific output as a poet, historian, critic of literature and language, cultural commentator, activist and encourager of Caribbean arts spans almost fifty years. He is undoubtedly one of the towering figures of twentiethcentury Caribbean literature and yet his latest creative writings have been considerably neglected outside of the Caribbean, his profile much less high than might have been expected of such an important voice. Marcia Burrowes's interview with Brathwaite, conducted at his home in "cowpastuh" Barbados in August 2002, is thus a welcome corrective to this trend and will hopefully encourage other readers to re-approach and reappraise Brathwaite in terms of his latest reflections and writings on Caribbean literature and culture. In the interview Brathwaite reflects on "what constitutes the Caribbean" and 'Caribbeanness' and its relation to a wider black diaspora. He also "revisitfs] the term 'creolization', for which he is widely known and [seeks] to invest a greater sense of the act of maroonage within its meaning". Like Oonya Kempadoo in her interview with Harald Leusmann in this issue, Brathwaite reflects on tourism and the tourist industry in Barbados and the Caribbean and its effects on "the environment and on the psyche of the Barbadian and Caribbean people" in terms of a "changing landscape and the loss of creative space for the artist". The interview ends with a discussion of the notion of the crossroads, a key concept in African and Caribbean culture as well as in Brathwaite's own life. Although Brathwaite is popularly known as a proponent of an Africancentred cultural politics, significantly in Burrowes's interview, he stresses that his real interest is to reach for a Caribbean aesthetic, "to discover and to articulate and to recognize what is our space, which is a Caribbean space, and that's made up of all the elements" of which the African is only one part.

1997 saw the passing of two poets whose distinctive contributions to Caribbean literature were characterised by passion and commitment. Martin Carter died in December, Shake Keane in November; both writers were seventy. Martin Carter will be remembered as one of the most important Guyanese writers of the twentieth century, his Poems of Resistance from British Guiana, written whilst imprisoned by the colonial authorities in the early 1950s, as one of the key texts of anti-colonial struggle in the Caribbean. Keane was a jazz trumpeter as well as a poet, and his poems, particularly when performed, testify to a lifetime’s experimentation with a poetry of the voice and poetry at the interface between music and poetry. One of the undoubted highlights of the year was the publication of The Bounty, Derek Walcott’s first collection of poems since his 1990 collection, Omeros. The title poem, with which the collection opens is ’not only an elegy for the poet’s mother, but also something of a literary self-examination and canticle of praise for natural abundance.’ The opening lines invoke the Caribbean as a locale colonized, in complex and sometimes contradictory ways, by the manifold imaginings, images and iconographies of religious

and individual voices with the death of Sam Selvon in 1994, 1995 witnessed another significant loss: the death of Selvon’s contemporary and fellow player in the literary landscape of 1950s and 1960s London: Andrew Salkey. Both Salkey and Selvon were commemorated and remembered in 1995. A special edition of Kunapipi in April 1995 was devoted to a celebration of Selvon’s life and work. This issue reprinted some early seminal pieces such

Given the loss to West Indian Literature of a number of its most important figures in the past five years – not least Sam Selvon and Martin Carter – it is particularly pleasing to record that in 2000 both Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott celebrated their seventieth year and looked back on prolific

In 1995 a new literary prize, the Saga Prize, was established for black authors born in Britain, prompted by its founder Marsha Hunt's belief that 'there is no black British fiction, period'. Hunt's comment, aside from its problematically narrow definition of the already contested term 'black British' as 'blacks born in Britain', reflects a much wider selective amnesia concerning black British literature. That such critical myopia should coexist with increased British media interest in West Indian and black British literature of late, is highly ironic;2 that it should so narrowly precede the fiftieth anniversary of the 'Windrush generation' points to the cultural and political urgency of re-assessing the contribution of West Indian and black British writers to post-war literature in Britain. Despite the possibility of tracing certain periodizations within this time span and the need to recognize shifts in the way such writers have been categor...

The Caribbean is in many ways, as Richard Wilk has shown in his 2006 study of food and globalisation in a Belizean context, the perfect example of the mixing of ethnicities, cultures,and culinary practices as well as a region with one of the longest histories of global connectedness and globalizing processes in relation to food. However, there have been surprisingly very few studies of the relationship between food and culture in a Caribbean context. This article builds and extends upon Wilk’s important work on food status and respectability in Belize (2006, 2008) by considering the textual representation of food, food patterns, and foodways in some earlier—and crucially, in some wider—Caribbean contexts. The main focus is on the relationship between food and social order in a Caribbean plantation context and, in particular, on responses to food and social hierarchies of food status (e.g. between indigenous, naturalised or imported foods), as they are explored and mediated in a numb...

... 86 PATRICK WILLIAMS SECTION 2 Remapping the postcolonial: globalism, localism and diasporas 99 8 Introduction 101 CRISTINA SANDRU 9 ... ERIN GOHEEN GLANVILLE 12 MaJian's Red Dust: global China and the travelling-self 139 JEFFREY MATHER 13 Cosmopolitan ...

The Journal of Postcolonial Writing is an academic journal devoted to the study of literary and cultural texts produced in various postcolonial locations around the world. It explores the interface between postcolonial writing, postcolonial and related critical theories, and the economic, political and cultural forces that shape contemporary global developments. In addition to criticism focused on literary fiction, drama and poetry, we publish theoretically-informed articles on a variety of genres and media, including film, performance and other cultural practices, which address issues of relevance to postcolonial studies. In particular we seek to promote diasporic voices, as well as creative and critical texts from various national or global margins.

The Journal of Postcolonial Writing also publishes
• Special issues with a particular thematic or regional focus
• Interviews with and profiles of postcolonial writers and theorists
• Reviews of critical studies of contemporary writing
• Selections of creative writing:  poetry and short prose fiction
• Archival material relevant to critical articles accepted for publication

Our ambition is to foster a creative dialogue among theories and texts influenced by postcolonial preoccupations and debates, and a larger engagement of contemporary literary criticism with regional and local forces (ethnicities, alternative cultural practices, diffuse points of resistance etc). Our concern is thus not only with exploring contemporary forms of imperialism (political, financial, technological, ecological), but also – and especially – with promoting cultural texts and practices which successfully challenge these.

The Journal of Postcolonial Writing is listed in the Thomson Reuters Arts & Humanities Citation Index.®

All peer review is double blind and submissions are typically reviewed by two referees.

Mrs H. Graham (E.A.C.) Yearwood's cookery book, West Indian and Other Recipes (1911, 1932) is that rare thing: an early West Indian cookbook. It is a collection of over 2,300 written recipes from mainly female contributors which was compiled by a prominent white creole woman on the island of Barbados in the early decades of the twentieth century. It is rare because very few early cookbooks have survived a fragile archive in a West Indian context and rare because, to this day, West Indians tend to eschew written or printed recipes in favour of individual culinary improvisation and/or family traditions which are, first and foremost, oral in transmission. The cookbook is exceptionally important in shedding light on an often-overlooked minority tradition of written recipes and cookbooks produced by and for the 'white elite' Eurocreole and colonial expatriate community of early twentieth century Barbados. Although a printed text, West Indian and Other Recipes is also key in being one of the very first – if not the first-recordings and transcriptions of earlier Barbadian/Caribbean foodways and culinary practices, which hitherto had existed only outside of print culture, in oral tradition. As a written text from a primarily oral culture and one which includes paratextual advertisements for local businesses, it is also a fascinating early document which reveals much about the material culture, tastes and codes of respectability of a colonial society starkly divided along class, gender and racial lines. In particular, it sheds light on the Euro-Creole elite and the networks of a growing black and mixed-race middle class eager to gain cultural and culinary capital and to consume material goods as a sign of their upward social mobility. In this sense, the cookbook acts as both a 'missive and [a] commodity to be bought " (Irving, 178) as well as signaling the close relationship of print culture in this period to the wider 'world of business' (Irving, 204). The article argues that 'the paratextual elements of the [cookbook] provide a wealth of information about the material conditions of [cookery] writing, reading, printing and publishing in the West Indies, which in turn, shape our understanding of the [culinary culture] of the early decades of the twentieth-century.' (Irving, 203).

Journal of Multicultural Discourses (JMD) is a premier international journal in discourse studies which aims to enhance cultural diversity, equality and prosperity in social life as well as in scholarship. A forerunner in the cultural politics of language, communication or discourse research, the journal has published over the past five years numerous articles on Asian, African, Latin American, as well as western, approaches to discourses in diverse cultural settings. To consolidate its multicultural-intellectual project and to answer to the challenges of the contemporary times, the journal welcomes papers especially, though not exclusively, on the following subject matters:
Cultural dialogue and critique on research perspectives and frameworks
Culturally unique, or innovative, approaches
Culturally inclusive or pluralist approaches
Discourses of cultural marginalization, repression or imperialism
Discourses of (under-)development
Discourses of cultural transformation
Discourses of cultural cooperation or harmony


Thoughts on Journal of Multicultural Discourses
"The Journal of Multicultural Discourses has become a valuable platform for interdisciplinary debates in today’s multicultural world, featuring contributions from prestigious scholars from around the world. The Journal has published contributions about a range of theories and arguments embedded in a wide array of theoretical and philosophical frameworks that have helped to move debates beyond conventional Western ideas. The Journal has been open to vigorous and lively debates across the social sciences. Editor Shi-xu should be highly commended for deftly editing an important resource for cultural and communication scholars from around the world." - Silvio Waisbord, Editor, Journal of Communication, George Washington University, USA

"Few journals have so quickly become standards in their fields as Journal of Multicultural Discourses. In fact, it is almost impossible for any international scholar to be considered seriously in the intellectual mix of contemporary communication questions and issues without reference to the writers who have been assembled in the ten years of outstanding leadership represented by Professor Shi-xu. JMD is well-edited, timely, and a center for discussion. Its trajectory will bring it into further discourse and engagement with the leading scholars in the fields of culture and communication." - Molefi Kete Asante, Editor, Black Studies, Temple University, USA

"The Journal of Multicultural Discourses (JMD) is a highly-important academic journal with significant international reach. As a journal created for and committed to providing a platform for advancing Cultural Discourse Studies, JMD consciously considers issues of cultural diversity and Western-centrism. Consistent themes in the journal circulate around ways Western societies implicitly and explicitly discriminate against non-Western societies. As well, articles explore the implications of discrimination on policies, power, and relationships. As JMD authors expose and critique Western-centric biases and power relations at multiple levels—from society to academia alike—they offer a holistic, cultural view with global values in their place. This is one of the many important contributions JMD makes as it works to create a forum for discussion of discourse analysis research that is culturally-conscious, reflexive, and critical. Such an approach promotes a more culturally-inclusive world, nationally, transnationally, and within academia. JMD provides a space in which to do this. To be sure, JMD has developed its own niche, one with very little overlap with other journals, and thus, should be an SSCI journal. In fact, I already think of it as such." - Kent Alan Ono, Editor, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, University of Utah, USA

"The Journal of Multicultural Discourses was founded only a matter of years ago, but it has quickly achieved a prominent position in the field of discourse studies. This field is traditionally organized on the basis of main oppositions between micro and macro, sociological and psychological, critical and descriptive approaches, European and North-American trends, etc. The whole point of the journal is to bring to the fore the ethnocentric dimension of some basic assumptions of discourse study researchers. This allows it to provide greater visibility to new authors, new topics and to open new perspectives. I therefore believe the journal fulfils an essential role, given its critical function in our field of research." - Dominique Maingueneau, University of Paris Sorbonne

"The Journal of Multicultural Discourses serves several distinct needs for those interested studying the world as a discursive phenomenon. It does so deeply by providing a space for theoretical discussion of what a “cultural discourse” indeed is; it does so methodologically as it wrestles with ways of accumulating discursive data and their analyses; it does so empirically as it demonstrates how cultural discourses are indeed highly localized practices that are shaped and patterned in their own contexts of use; it does so critically as it demonstrates how any one cultural discourse provides affordances for some but inevitably disadvantages others. It is the attention to the study of cultural discourse as theoretically demanding, methodologically complex, empirically deep, and critically negotiable that distinguishes this journal as not only significant, but as timely and profoundly important in the world today." - Donal Carbaugh, University of Massachusetts 

Peer Review Integrity

All submitted manuscripts are subject to initial appraisal by the Editor, and, if found suitable for further consideration, to peer review by independent, anonymous expert referees. All peer review is double-blind and submission is online via ScholarOne Manuscripts.

Journal of Multicultural Discourses also accepts and publishes papers in French/ La revue Journal of Multicultural Discourses accepte et publie aussi des articles en français.

The Journal of Postcolonial Writing is an academic journal devoted to the study of literary and cultural texts produced in various postcolonial locations around the world. It explores the interface between postcolonial writing, postcolonial and related critical theories, and the economic, political and cultural forces that shape contemporary global developments. In addition to criticism focused on literary fiction, drama and poetry, we publish theoretically-informed articles on a variety of genres and media, including film, performance and other cultural practices, which address issues of relevance to postcolonial studies. In particular we seek to promote diasporic voices, as well as creative and critical texts from various national or global margins.

The Journal of Postcolonial Writing also publishes
• Special issues with a particular thematic or regional focus
• Interviews with and profiles of postcolonial writers and theorists
• Reviews of critical studies of contemporary writing
• Selections of creative writing:  poetry and short prose fiction
• Archival material relevant to critical articles accepted for publication

Our ambition is to foster a creative dialogue among theories and texts influenced by postcolonial preoccupations and debates, and a larger engagement of contemporary literary criticism with regional and local forces (ethnicities, alternative cultural practices, diffuse points of resistance etc). Our concern is thus not only with exploring contemporary forms of imperialism (political, financial, technological, ecological), but also – and especially – with promoting cultural texts and practices which successfully challenge these.

The Journal of Postcolonial Writing is listed in the Thomson Reuters Arts & Humanities Citation Index.®

All peer review is double blind and submissions are typically reviewed by two referees.

"A special issue of the influential post-colonial literary journal Kunapipi, guest edited by David Dabydeen, provides a valuable companion to Wambu's anthology. It offers a range of new writing by British Caribbeans and academic articles that sketch in chapters of the post-Windrush experience, along with reprinted material. Kunapipi has carved out its own niche among post-colonial literary journals, bringing together creative and critical writing, painting and photography, and this issue is among its best in recent years. Dabydeen's introduction is concise, perceptive and informative, as are the academic essays by Philip Nanton on the influential Caribbean Voices programme, broadcast on the BBC's West Indian Service from 1943 to 1958 and a first port of call for such writers as Selvon and Lamming, Stewart Brown on James Berry and Sarah Lawson Welsh on recent critical myopia with regard to black British writing and neglected aspects of Linton Kwesi Johnson's work. Other high spots include Yvonne Brewster, the leading Caribbean-born theatre director in Britain, talking about Louise Bennett, photographs of the Notting Hill Carnival by Deo Persaud, a cover by painter Aubrey Williams, and two fine short poems by John Agard, who despite his success in a range of performance and related contexts, has still to achieve the critical reputation his sometimes minimalist work richly deserves."

See http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=162594&sectioncode=6 for full review by John Thieme, The Times Higher, 14th August 1998:

See also The Year's Work in English Studies 1998 79(1):802-903.

The name of the one that disappeared must have gotten inscribed some place else." (Derrida, Specters of Marx, 4) "What does it mean to follow a ghost? And what if this came down to being followed by it, always persecuted perhaps by the chase we are leading?" (Derrida, Specters of Marx, 10) "The archive: if we want to know what that will have meant, we will only know in times to come. Perhaps." (Derrida, Archive Fever, p.36)

Many of the poems in Jay Bernard’s Surge (2019) were inspired by Bernard’s 2017 residency at the George Padmore Institute, London, an experience that allowed them to access the Institute’s unique archives on black British history. This article considers both the politics and aesthetics of Surge as a collection which addresses the social and material in/exclusions experienced by black Britons within some specific historical and socio-cultural contexts, including the 1981 New Cross and 2017 Grenfell fires in London. Drawing on theoretical insights such as Derrida’s concepts of ‘hauntology’ and ‘archive fever’, this article argues that the notion of the archive is central to both the aesthetic and political project of Surge. The varied formal and aesthetic experimentation of many of the poems allow Bernard to ask some challenging questions of British society and its relation to its history, as well as the complex tension between public histories and personal accounts. Bernard harnesses the power of poetry to queer or unsettle other kinds of discourse (including orthodox historical narrative) by imaginatively re-embodying hitherto disembodied voices, enabling them to speak in the interstices between private memory and public history in some unique (and strikingly affecting) ways.