The Caribbean Postcolonial

Drawing on the long and varied history of discourses of cultural hybridity across the caribbean, this book explores the rich and fraught cultural crossings that are often theorized homogeneously in postcolonial studies as 'hybridity'. What is the relationship of cultural hybridity to social equality? Why have some forms of hybridity been enshrined in the caribbean imagination and others disavowed? What is the appeal of cultural hybridity to nationalist and post-nationalist projects alike? What can we learn from the hybridization of Afro-caribbean and Indo-caribbean cultures set in motion by slavery and indentureship? In answering these questions, this book intervenes in several important debates in postcolonial studies about cultural resistance and popular agency, feminism and cultural nationalism, the relations between postmodernism and postcolonialism, and the status of nationalism in an age of globalization.

"The Caribbean Postcolonial seeks to ground the claim that a genuine poetics of Caribbean hybridity can only make sense within a politics of equality. Shalini Puri reads social performances across a spectrum of Caribbean practices and identities - novels, manifestos, nation languages, Hosay, Carnival, calypso, chutney-soca, jibaro, dougla - not only to challenge some of the ways in which 'hybridity' is recognized, represented, and celebrated in the Caribbean theoretical industry, but more importantly, to show us how interpretive communities in the Caribbean participate in the making of both official and unofficial narratives about themselves. Shalini Puri discovers a negotiating heart within the body of Caribbean continuances. She finds an unresolvable dialectic between discourses of complicity and those of resistance. The Caribbean Postcolonial brings Caribbean critical hybridity narratives back from the garrison of post-nationalist sentiment, back from the war against universalist knowledges, and home to their inalienable residence in difficulty and interrogation." - Stephen Slemon, University of Alberta

"Shalini Puri brilliantly and convincingly takes on postcolonial studies for its marginalization of the Caribbean given the centrality of cultural hybridity as its episteme regnant. Puri's fascinating book is not merely a corrective to this 'imperialist' rejection of the Caribbean, but a profound demonstration of its consequences for the interrogation of hybridity's poetics and politics. As a tour de force of Caribbean hybridities the book brilliantly unveils the latter's theoretics, poetics, and aesthetics and exposes the limitations of the almost universalistic argument for its inevitable contestation of nationalism's discourses of difference. The Caribbean Postcolonial takes cultural studies to a new and exciting level with its profound and powerful interrogation of Caribbean hybridities. In the process, it locates the Caribbean at the center of the analytics of the field of postcolonial studies." - Percy Hintzen, Professor and Chair of African American Studies, University of California at Berkeley

"One emerges from a reading of this book with a vivid sense that Puri's work adds an important new dimension to Caribbean cultural studies because of the multiple perspectives from which she considers the historical conjuncture between gender, ethnicity,and class - particularly in her interrogation of a 'dougla' poetics. Rather than privileging claims for hybridity over questions of social equality, as she argues much of the recent work in cultural studies has done, Puri investigates the links between these terms. Her prose is respectful without being deferential, combative without being contemptuous. This is academic writing at its most engaged." - Rhonda Cobham-Sander, Amherst College

Shalini Puri is Associate Professor of English at the University Pittsburgh, USA.