Archives

JWIL Volume 34, Number 2, April 2026

Introduction: How Shall the History of the Journal of West Indian Literature Be Told?
Cornel Bogle

Essays

Moses Mis-Recognized: Sam Selvon’s Non-Representational Politics
Jess Hannah

Incongruous Sovereignty: C. L. R. James and the West Indian Novel
Ariel Martino

From Jameson to James to Jamaica: A Brief History of Seven Killings as a Political Form of Postmodernism
M. Keith Booker and Isra Daraiseh

“Get too close and you get the disease”: A Pathology of Racial and Gendered Purity in Elizabeth Nunez’s Prospero’s Daughter
Alexis K. Samuels

Between Tradition and Globalization: Drug Addiction as a Symbol of Social Issues in the Caribbean according to Tony Delsham
Coraline Kandassamy

Special Contribution

Deceptive Relationships: Reading Creole in Anglophone Caribbean Literature with Velma Pollard
Simona Bertacco and Velma Pollard

Interview

A Different Starting Point: A Conversation between Philip Nanton and Shalini Puri

Poem

Blind Date: Old Movie in Three Reels
Curdella Forbes

Book Reviews

Alison Donnell, writer and editor, Lost and Found: An A–Z of Neglected Writers of the Anglophone Caribbean
Emily L. Taylor

Claude McKay, Letters in Exile: Transnational Journeys of a Harlem Renaissance Writer, edited by Brooks E. Hefner and Gary Edward Holcomb
A. D. McKenzie

Tao Leigh Goffe, Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis
Michael Niblett

Monique Roffey, Passiontide
Lucy Evans

Canisia Lubrin, Code Noir
Barbara Gfoellner

Oneka LaBennett, Global Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond
Kavita Gawrinauth

Notes on Contributors

JWIL Volume 34, Number 1, November 2025

Introduction
Nadi Edwards and Antonia MacDonald

Essays

Listening with Glyne: Genealogies of Creole
Faith Smith

From Pat Boone to Shake Keane: A Personal Voyage through Radio and Voice
Philip Nanton

From Yaad to Japan: Constructing Jamaican Identity in the Diaspora
Aieka Yasheva Smith

“Why should the living dead return to plague one’s peaceful dreams?”: Nihilism and a Poetics of Corporeality in Wilson Harris’s The Four Banks of the River of Space
Tohru Nakamura

Things You Lose in the Ocean: The Author, AI, and Caribbean Screenwriting
Rae-ann Smith

Creative Pieces

My Father’s Secret Hiding Places
Kim Robinson-Walcott

An Ode to the BBC and the Development of Anglophone Caribbean Literature
Lehana Simon

Caribbean Man
Lehana Simon

Afterword
Glyne A. Griffith

Book Reviews

Robert de la Chevotière, Tall Is Her Body
Gugu Hlongwane

Marcia Douglas, The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive: being dreamity, algoriddims, chants & riffs
Daniel Arbino

Alejandro Heredia, Loca: A Novel
Shayne Ventura

Nalo Hopkinson, Blackheart Man
Debra Providence

Sharma Taylor, What a Mother’s Love Don’t Teach You
Jacinth Howard

Patricia McDonald, editor, Waves: An Anthology of Caribbean Literature
Sheryl C. Gifford

Myriam J. A. Chancy, Harvesting Haiti: Reflections on Unnatural Disasters
Martin Munro

Notes on Contributors

JWIL Volume 33, Number 2, April 2025

Introduction – “Leaving Traces”: Decolonial Hauntings and Affective Ecologies
Michael A. Bucknor and Aon Ul Abideen

Essays

Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction and the Impossibility of Innocence: Representing the Trauma of Childhood Experience in Trinidadian Young-Adult Literature
Betsy Nies

Artificial Intelligence, Tyrannies, and Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber
Kris Singh

Wilson Harris, the Zemi Shaman
Gabriel Cambraia Neiva

Interviews

“Where the hauntings emerge”: A Conversation with Rajiv Mohabir
Anita Baksh

“Glimpses of a beauty that you know exists”: A Conversation with Linzey Corridon
Ronald Cummings

Tributes for Velma Pollard

Jean D’Costa; Betty Wilson; Maureen Warner-Lewis; Joan Anim-Addo; Merle Collins; Evelyn O’Callaghan; Amina Blackwood Meeks; Alecia McKenzie; Alison Donnell; Michael A. Bucknor; Millicent A. A. Graham; Tanya Shields; Tanya Shirley; Ronald Cummings; Kezia Page

Book Reviews

Jocelyn Fenton Stitt, Dreams of Archives Unfolded: Absence and Caribbean Life Writing
Reba K. Charles-Dickson

Matthew Chin, Fractal Repair: Queer Histories of Modern Jamaica
Kedon Willis

Shani Mootoo, Oh Witness Deh!
Courtenay Chan

Aimé Césaire, ……And the Dogs Were Silent / ……Et les chiens se taisaient, translated by Alex Gil
Laëtitia Saint-Loubert

Vijay Mishra, V. S. Naipaul and World Literature
Nivedita Misra

Notes on Contributors

Vol. 33, No. 1, November 2024

Editorial Preface
Raphael Dalleo

George Lamming’s Caribbean Epistemology
Linden F. Lewis   

“Shame is a revolutionary sentiment”: Shame and Affective Stratum in George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin
Yutaka Yoshida

The Blurred Binary between Humanity and Animality in In the Castle of My Skin
Jacqueline Retalis

Resistance to Racializing Surveillance in George Lamming’s The Emigrants
Stephanie J. Brown

“Architecture of the Future”: Negative Capability and the Politics and Poetics of Feeling in George Lamming’s Natives of My Person
Tohru Nakamura

Three Poems: “Visit to Combermere School, October 2023”; “A Commitment to Righting Historical Wrongs”; “A Marxist Analysis of West Indian Fatherhood”
Amílcar Peter Sanatan

Book Reviews

Christopher Laird, Equal to Mystery: In Search of Harold Sonny Ladoo
Kris Singh

Zalika Reid-Benta, River Mumma
Renan Cabral Paulino

Notes on Contributors

Vol. 32, No. 2, April 2024

Editorial Preface
Nicola Hunte

Essays

Beyond Boundaries: Navigating Place, Faith, and Selfhood in Aliyyah Eniath’s The Yard
Victoria V. Chang   

Reconceptualizing Cross-Cultural Influence: Derek Walcott’s Imitation of Hokusai
Gavin Herbertson

“The white man is still there. The white duppy”: Gothic Haunting and Colourism in Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings
Cato Marks

Interviews

“Broadcast now published”: An Interview with Caryl Phillips on the Publication of his Radio Plays
Bénédicte Ledent

From the BBC to Bocas: An Interview with Marina Salandy-Brown on Leadership and Literary Community Building
Lisa Outar

Tribute Section to Edward Baugh

Dirge
John Robert Lee

Edward Baugh—In Memoriam
Glyne Griffith

For Edward Baugh
Asha Varadharajan

Tribute to Professor Eddie Baugh
Evelyn O’Callaghan

True-True Love
Pamela Mordecai

Poet of Port Antonio
Ronald Cummings

Book Reviews

Earl Lovelace’s Is Just a Movie
Funso Aiyejina

Kerstin Oloff, Ecology of the Zombie: World-Culture and the Monstrous
Lizette Gerber

Jacinth Howard, The Mother Island
Linzey Corridon

Notes on Contributors

Vol. 32, No. 1, November 2023

Special Issue on Caribbean Literature, Art, and Environmental Activism

Edited by
Leah Rosenberg

We dedicate this issue of JWIL to Edward Baugh, a man whose accomplishments as a poet, scholar, teacher, and administrator were essential to building and sustaining over decades the West Indian Literature Conference, this journal, the field of Caribbean literary studies, and the poets and scholars of today and of the future. Let us honor his extraordinary wisdom, erudition, eloquence, empathy, and service by continuing his work.

Editorial Preface
Leah Rosenberg

Articles

Public Art and Military Afterlives in Culebra, Puerto Rico
Alejandra Bronfman

Audre Lorde’s and Sofía Gallisá Muriente’s Hurricane Diaries: Writing Strategies of Survival in Colonial Disaster
Jeannine Murray-Román

Postcards Remixed: Ekphrasis, Ecology, and the Everyday in Caribbean Postcard Poetry
Shalini Puri

Ship and Storm: Caribbean Hurricane Literature and Songs of Middle Passage Migrancy
Aliyah Khan

El/Oil Dorado: Art and Activism in Guyana
Sasha Ann Panaram

Pray to Flowers—A Plot of Disalienation
Annalee Davis

Folk Cultures and Animal Sentience in Olive Senior’s Selected Poetry
Hannah Regis

“We must look after each other”: Human and Non-Human Extinctions on Hispaniola in Edwidge Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light and Rita Indiana’s Tentacle
Seanna Viechweg

Cli-Fi Cartographies/Future Catastrophes: Social Justice and Tumultuous Unmoorings in Contemporary Caribbean Short Fiction
Akhim Alexis

“This is Jamaica”: Circumscribed Citizenship in Esther Figueroa’s I Live for Art (2013) and Fly Me to the Moon (2019)
Rachel Moseley-Wood

“The everyday is everything”: A Conversation with Esther Figueroa
Leah Rosenberg and Shalini Puri

Fly Me to the Moon: Imagining a Future beyond Extraction
Esther Figueroa, introduction by Leah Rosenberg

Book Reviews

Mary Ann Gosser Esquilín, Culture, Nature, and the Other in Caribbean Literature: An Ecocritical Approach
Leah Rosenberg

Dreaming the “Unthinkable”: Identities, Longing, and Self-Liberation in Andre Bagoo’s The Dreaming. Review of Andre Bagoo, The Dreaming.
Jacqueline Jiang

Notes on Contributors

Vol. 31, No. 2, April 2023

Edited by Carol Bailey and Stephanie McKenzie

Editorial Preface
Carol Bailey and Stephanie McKenzie

Articles

Green and Fierce in a Place: Pamela Mordecai’s Poetic Environment
Elaine Savory

green and wild: poetry in play. A creative response to Pamela Mordecaiʼs A Fierce Green Place: New and Selected Poems
Curmiah Lisette

“A Poem Is a Power”: Pamela Mordecai’s Poetic Journey
Opal Palmer Adisa

Refashioning the Empire’s Remains: Pamela Mordecai’s Poetry for Children
Lissa Paul

Feminist Interventions and Discursive and Poetic Practices in Pamela Mordecai’s Poems
Simone A. James Alexander

Review of Pamela Mordecai, A Fierce Green Place: New and Selected Poems
Vladimir Lucien

An Eden with Teeth. Review of Pamela Mordecai, A Fierce Green Place: New and Selected Poems
Arturo Desimone

“I eat those words like they is food”: The Prismatic Poetry of Pamela Mordecai. Review of Pamela Mordecai, A Fierce Green Place: New and Selected Poems
Steven W. Beattie

“People Encountering People” and “The Comfort of Making”: An Interview with Pamela Mordecai about Sandberry Press and More
Michael A. Bucknor

Copy-Editing and More: A Fierce Green Place
Teri-Ann McDonald

The Strength of Pamela Mordecai’s Poetry
Jordan Trice

Much More Besides
Rachel L. Mordecai

Book Review

Alison Donnell, Creolized Sexualities: Undoing Heteronormativity in the Literary Imagination of the Anglo-Caribbean
Keja Valens

Notes on Contributors

Vol. 31, No. 1, November 2022

Edited by Ronald Cummings

Editorial Preface
Ronald Cummings

Critical Forum: Remembering George Lamming 

George Lamming and Caribbean Political Conscience
Aaron Kamugisha 

Remembering George Lamming: The Genealogy of the Human in the Arts of Freedom
Curdella Forbes

The Man on the Rattan Chair: George Lamming and the Making of Common Space
Honor Ford-Smith

Articles

From Indigenous Practice to Trope: Kanaima in the Literary Geography of the Guiana Shield
Amanda M. Smith 

Decolonial Fissures in Dominican Sugar-Cane Novels: Inclusive Narrative Spaces during the Early Trujillato
Arne Romanowski

“The monster [he has] become”: Fragility, Masculine Rage, and Resistance in Lindsay Barrett’s Lipskybound
Jason R. Marley

“Worrying the line”: Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Prose Poetry
Kelsi Delaney 

Archiving the First Ten Years of the West Indian Literature Conference: Institutional Memory and West Indian Literary Celebration
Evelyn O’Callaghan 

Interviews

“A labor of love”: An Interview with Evelyn O’Callaghan on the History of JWIL and on Teaching and Mentoring in the Field of West Indian Literature
Lisa Outar

Conversation and Tea with Maryse Condé
Kavita Ashana Singh

The Complexity of Community: Ecology, Science Fiction, and the Future of Literature—A Conversation with Tobias Buckell
D. A. Vivian

Book Reviews

“We Reach,” Now Where We Going Next? Caribbean Literary Studies and the Anthologizing Impulse
Patricia Joan Saunders

Evelyn O’Callaghan and Tim Watson, editors, Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1800–1920, vol. 1
Tracing the Transition: Literary Representations of Major Shifts and Aftermaths in Caribbean Literature
Rachel Northrop and Jordan Rogers

Raphael Dalleo and Curdella Forbes, editors, Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1920–1970, vol. 2
Looking beyond the Metropole: Revisioning Caribbean Literature in a Regional Context (1920–1970)
Sadé Gordon and Gabrielle Mary Jean-Louis

Ronald Cummings and Alison Donnell, editors, Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1970–2020, vol. 3
Reading against the Romance: Post-independence Caribbean Literature, 1970–2020
Jovanté Anderson

Hazel Simmons-McDonald, Shabine and Other Stories
Esther Phillips

Notes on Contributors

Vol. 30, No. 2, April 2022

Special Issue on Kamau Brathwaite – Guest Editor Kelly Baker Josephs – JWIL Editor in Charge Lisa Outar

Table of Contents

Editorial Preface: Engaging Kamau Brathwaite
Kelly Baker Josephs

Kamau Brathwaite and the remix engine
Ronald Cummings, Kaie Kellough, and Nalini Mohabir

Kamau Brathwaite’s Poems from Ghana: Making Sense of Rhyme
Jarad Zimbler

“this strange dark photograph at first so indistinct”: Kamau Brathwaite and the Photographic Image
Andrew Rippeon

“like quetzalcoatl flying”: Afro-Caribbean and Amerindian Entanglements in Kamau Brathwaite
Dashiell Moore

Hope for the Pluriverse, Defeat of the Universe in the Work of Kamau Brathwaite
Elaine Savory

Heroes, Mothers, and Muses: Teaching Gender in Kamau Brathwaite
Rachel L. Mordecai

Using Digital Tools and Collaborative Writing to Engage Students with Kamau Brathwaite’s Poetry
Kim Evelyn

Lessons from Brathwaite: Breaking the Pentameter, Deepening Black Study
Bedour Alagraa


Book Reviews

Paul Barrett, editor, ’Membering Austin Clarke
Cornel Bogle

Notes on Contributors

Vol. 30, No. 1, November 2021

Special Issue on Dub Poetry – Guest Editor Phanuel Antwi – JWIL Editor in Charge Michael A. Bucknor

Table of Contents

Introduction – Anticolonial Dreaming: The End of an Aura and the Persistence of Dub
Phanuel Antwi

Deja Voodoo: Literary Coup under the Influence of Dub
Klyde “Durm-I” Broox
Audio Version sound-processed by Simon Orpana  

Reading Kei Miller’s In Nearby Bushes in the Wake of Dub Poetry
Janet Neigh

Dubbing Dub Poetry? Approaching Lee “Scratch” Perry, Poetically
Isis Semaj-Hall

Dub Poetry’s Global Impact, Forty Years On
A. D. McKenzie and Tobias Schlosser

Dub Theatre and Storytelling: A Conversation with ahdri zhina mandiela (in Eight Movements)
Ronald Cummings and Nalini Mohabir

Catching Bullets with Her Ass: Matrilineality and the Canadian Dub Poetry Tradition in the Work of d’bi.young anitafrika
Natalie Wall


Book Reviews

Safiya Sinclair, Cannibal
Lauren K. Alleyne

Ingrid Persaud, Love after Love
Bastien Bomans

Stephanie Pocock Boeninger, Literary Drowning: Postcolonial Memory in Irish and Caribbean Writing
Ellen Howley

Njelle Hamilton, Phonographic Memories: Popular Music and the Contemporary Caribbean Novel
Dadland Maye

Jacqueline Bishop, The Gymnast and Other Positions
Emily Taylor

Notes on Contributors