This collection takes as its starting point the ubiquitous representation of various forms of mental illness, breakdown and psychopathology in Caribbean writing, and the fact that this topic has been relatively neglected in criticism, especially in Anglophone texts, apart from the scholarship devoted to Jean Rhys’s
Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). The contributions to this volume demonstrate that much remains to be done in rethinking the trope of “madness” across Caribbean literature by local and diaspora writers. This book asks how focusing on literary manifestations of apparent mental aberration can extend our understanding of Caribbean narrative and culture, and can help us to interrogate the norms that have been used to categorize art from the region, as well as the boundaries between notions of rationality, transcendence and insanity across cultures.
Table of Content
1. Introduction: “‘Madness is rampant on this island’: Writing Altered States in Anglophone Caribbean Literature” - Bénédicte Ledent, Evelyn O’Callaghan and Daria Tunca.- 2. “‘Kingston Full of Them’: Madwomen at the Crossroads” - Kelly Baker Josephs.- 3. “‘Fighting Mad to Tell Her Story’: Madness, Rage and Literary Self-Making in Jean Rhys and Jamaica Kincaid” - Denise de Caires Narain.- 4. “Madness and Silence in Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore and In the Falling Snow - Ping Su.- 5. “Speaking of Madness in the First Person/ Speaking Madness in the Second Person? Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and ‘The Cheater’s Guide to Love’” - Delphine Munos.- 6. “What is ‘worse besides’? An Ecocritical Reading of Madness in Caribbean Fiction” - Carine M. Mardorossian.- 7. “Performing Colonial Madness in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother” - Rebecca Romdhani.- 8. “Horizons of Desire in Caribbean Queer Speculative Fiction: Marlon James’s John Crow’s Devil” - Michael A. Bucknor.- 9. “When Seeing is Believing: Enduring Injustice in Merle Collins’s The Colour of Forgetting” - Alison Donnell.- 10. “Migrant Madness or Poetics of Spirit? Teaching Erna Brodber’s and Kei Miller’s Fiction” - Evelyn O’Callaghan.- 11. “(Re)Locating Madness and Prophesy: An Interview with Kei Miller” - Rebecca Romdhani.
About the author
Bénédicte Ledent is Professor in the English Department of the University of Liège, Belgium.
Evelyn O’Callaghan is Professor of West Indian Literature at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados.
Daria Tunca is Lecturer in the English Department of the University of Liège, Belgium.
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