Middle Passages

This chapter analyzes uses of Greek and Roman classical texts as mediating passages in anglophone Caribbean literature of the Middle Passage. In Derek Walcott’s Omeros and Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, the classics are remediated and reclaimed as part of the project of framing the ineffable epic of the bones of those killed in the crossing. Walcott’s and Philip’s use of multilayered Latin etymologies and their subversive signifying of classical texts exemplify a subversive, anagrammatic philology explored in the radical black aesthetic theories of Fred Moten and Christina Sharpe. In the process, both authors explore the potential of Greek and Roman classical texts as a source for mediating modern historical memory in the Caribbean.

Windrush

‘Windrush’ is a term used to describe the post-World War II generation of writers from the English-speaking Caribbean who were published (and most often lived) in Great Britain. Although generally associated with postcolonial or Caribbean literary studies, many of these writers—including authors such as Wilson Harris, George Lamming, and Samuel Selvon—were seen by their contemporaries as inheritors of the tradition of modernism. Adapting the formally experimental tendencies of pre-war modernism to anti-colonial critique, members of the Windrush generation were widely celebrated in the British literary world as a vibrant new group of writers along the lines of James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. Pioneering figures in the emergence of Anglophone Caribbean literature, they also represent a lesser-known strain of late modernism, one that seized on the unruly, oppositional, and utopian energies characteristic of modernist writing and focused them more firmly on issues of race, ethnicity, and empire.