The Caribbean

Abstract

Caribbean literature and theory provide a key staging ground for a postcolonial reformulation of the world literature paradigm. From its beginnings, Caribbean literature has articulated a global vision even as it has developed literary tactics to assert the value of the local and what Édouard Glissant calls “the right to opacity.” Caribbean fiction and poetry challenge the Eurocentrism of dominant models of world literature by exposing the creolized condition of metropolitan as well as colonial culture. In so doing, they demonstrate literature’s capacity as an aesthetic medium to interrogate, disrupt and remake the world created by colonialism. Thus, Caribbean writing encourages us to attend not only to the ways in which literature registers globalizing processes but also to how it actively constructs new worlds that reflect critically on colonial and neo-colonial power structures.