Contemporary Caribbean Writing andDeleuze maps anew intellectual and literary history of postcolonial Caribbean writing andthought spanning from the 1930s surrealist movement to the present,crossing the region's language blocs,and focused on the interconnected principles of creativity and commemoration.Exploring the work of Rene Menil, edouard Glissant, Wilson Harris, DerekWalcott, Antonio Benitez-Rojo, Pauline Melville, Robert Antoni and NaloHopkinson, this study reveals the explicit and implicit engagement withDeleuzian thought at work in contemporary Caribbean writing.Uniting for the first time two majorschools of contemporary thought - postcolonialism and post-continentalphilosophy - this study establishes anew and innovative critical discourse for Caribbean studies and postcolonialtheory beyond the oppositional dialectic of colonizer and colonized. Drawingfrom Deleuze's writings on Bergson, Nietzsche and Spinoza, this studyinterrogates the postcolonial tropes of newness, becoming, relationality and aphilosophical concept of immanence that lie at the heart of a little-observeddialogue between contemporary Caribbean writers and Deleuze.
Lorna Burns is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Lincoln, UK.
Introduction: How Newness Enters the World; 1. Surrealism and the Caribbean: a Curious Line of Resemblance; 2. Creative Evolution: Wilson Harris and the Postcolonial Event; 3. Edouard Glissant and the Poetics of Chaosmosis; 4. Postcolonial Literature as Health: Robert Antoni and Nalo Hopkinson; 5. Becoming-postcolonial, Becoming-Caribbean: Patrick Chamoiseau and Junot Diaz; Bibliography; Index.
With a twin dedication to conceptual abstraction and to aesthetic creativity, Lorna Burns has produced a sustained, post-continental philosophical account of post-colonial literature, by authors such as Aimé Césaire, René Ménil, Édouard Glissant, Wilson Harris, Derek Walcott, Pauline Melville, Robert Antoni, Nalo Hopkinson, and others. An impressively sophisticated accomplishment.