Schuyler K. Esprit (University of Maryland –College Park)
This paper focuses on the role of reading in articulating definitions of
Caribbean literature and of the Caribbean in general. The speaker will historicize the
reader in West Indian social spaces and Caribbean literary texts to illustrate that the
region is characterized by a peculiar history that produces an equally peculiar cultural
landscape. Engaging passages from C. L. R. James’ Minty Alley and Jamaica Kincaid’s
Annie John, this presentation investigates how education, migration and expanding
definitions of Caribbean and Diaspora influence definitions of and critical approaches to
Caribbean literature. The paper will reveal how certain Caribbean spaces engender
particular categories of readers, and in turn, how these readers encounter, through their
performance of reading colonial texts in these spaces, their own West Indian identity
that is distinctly anti-colonial or postcolonial. By highlighting a range of relationships
between Caribbean texts and Caribbean readers, this speaker contends that defining
Caribbean literature in terms of reception is as critical as the investments in its
production.
