Memory and the Archival Turn in Caribbean Literature and Culture

Overview

This book discusses an archival turn in the work of contemporary Caribbean writers and visual artists across linguistic locations and whose work engages critically with various historical narratives and colonial and postcolonial records. This refiguration opens a critical space and retells stories and histories previously occluded in/by those records, and in spaces of the public sphere. Through poetics and aesthetics of fragmentation largely influenced by music and popular culture, their work encourages contrapuntal ways of (re)thinking histories; ways that interrogate the influence of colonial narratives in processes of silencing but also centre the knowledge found in oral histories and other forms of artistic archives outside official repositories. Discussing literature and selected artwork by artists from Britain, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and Trinidad and Tobago, Memory and the Archival Turn in Caribbean Literature and Culture demonstrates the historiographical significance of artistic and cultural production.