Archiving Creole Voices - by Marl'ene Edwin (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book examines the history and construction of the Creole voice in twentieth and twenty-first century Caribbean literature and the archivisation of Caribbean Creoles within the literary text.

Book Synopsis

This book examines the history and construction of the Creole voice in twentieth and twenty-first century Caribbean literature and the archivisation of Caribbean Creoles within the literary text.

Review Quotes

This book is unique because it uses Narratology to understand, track, and investigate cultural memory, emphasizing that some literary texts perform history, thus enabling alternative versions to be memorialized and archived. Edwin stages an encounter between Caribbean narratives and archive theory to argue that the literature teaches us to read history anew. In her analysis, literature not only supplements what official documents have left out; more importantly, it shows that in attending to archival erasures, her strategy for reading Caribbean texts will enable a different articulation of the past, one which witnesses the persistence of the past within the present. This volume testifies to the centrality of the Black Atlantic for questioning (neo-) colonial epistemologies and argues for a sophisticated interdisciplinary study of historical memory and for the preservation of creole languages.

About the Author

Marl'ene Edwin is deputy director of the Centre for Caribbean and Diaspora Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London.