Caribbean Poetics of Spirit

A Caribbean Poetics of Spirit offers a rare and penetrative exploration into Caribbean literary articulations of non-material and numinous presences. The study incorporates representations of African-Caribbean and Indigenous mythologies, syncretic spirituality, and magico-religious practices. From texts by ten writers, Hannah Regis extracts thematic and poetic references to Caribbean spectrality, its formal properties, and signifying practices to probe the nature and fictional representations of historical futures. Regis links the haunting spectrality of the Middle Passage with the lingering trauma and violence of the plantation order. She then raises the issue of how the latter has impacted complex ontological schema and considers how literary engagement with spirits operates as therapeutic interventions to psychic maladies, and as a potential model for a Caribbean aesthetic. This book also boldly re-conceptualizes ontological and epistemological approaches to contest colonial and neocolonial hegemonic ways of being. It provides a comprehensive taxonomy of Caribbean creative and intellectual practices, and theories for effectively categorizing and explaining the emergence and workings of spirit presences. Regis combines diverse theoretical perspectives from a range of scholars working within the traditions of postmemory, cultural memory, spirituality and Caribbean philosophy to formulate a crucial counter-archival history through which the voices of the oppressed find articulation and belonging while indexing a repository of cultural, psychological and affective expressions that are linked to the unfinished business of history. The writer adroitly contends that a Caribbean poetics of spirit sits at the edge of a new wave of literary criticism.