Becka’s Buckra Baby (1904) is a novel by Thomas MacDermot. Published under his pseudonym Tom Redcam by the All Jamaica Library, Becka’s Buckra Baby is a tragic story of race and class set in Jamaica. Understated and ironic, the novel critiques the social conditions of Jamaica under British colonialism. Mixing English with patois, MacDermot sheds light on the disparities between the island’s black and white communities, crafting a story now recognized as the beginning of modern Caribbean literature. Noel Maud Bronvola is peculiar. Her peculiar name, chosen by a peculiar father, has always set her apart. When her father dies, Noel chooses to remember him by his commitment to the people—despite widespread corruption, he chose to act honorably and spent years waiting for a promotion within the government that would never come. In his memory, Noel dedicates herself to helping others. She gets an education, becomes a teacher, and develops personal relationships with her young students from a poor black neighborhood in Kingston. One day, struggling with her desire to get married, she decides to present a gift to one of her students. Just before Christmastime, Noel brings a doll to Becka’s mother, who politely accepts a toy her daughter will have no time to play with. Neither of them could predict the tragedy to come. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Thomas MacDermot’s Becka’s Buckra Baby is a classic of English literature reimagined for modern readers.

"West Indian Literature, as a body of work, is a fairly recent phenomenon; and literary criticism has not always acknowledged the diversity of approaches to writing effectively. In Making West Indian Literature poet and critic Mervyn Morris explores examples of West Indian creativity shaping a range of responses to experience, which often includes colonial traces. Appreciating various kinds of making and a number of West Indian makers, these engaging essays and interviews display a recurrent interest in the processes of composition. Some of the prices highlight writer-performers who have not often been examined. This very readable book, often personal in tone, makes a distinctive contribution to the knowledge and understanding of West Indian Literature. "

Becka's Buckra Baby (1904) is a novel by Thomas MacDermot. Published under his pseudonym Tom Redcam by the All Jamaica Library, Becka's Buckra Baby is a tragic story of race and class set in Jamaica. Understated and ironic, the novel critiques the social conditions of Jamaica under British colonialism. Mixing English with patois, MacDermot sheds light on the disparities between the island's black and white communities, crafting a story now recognized as the beginning of modern Caribbean literature. Noel Maud Bronvola is peculiar. Her peculiar name, chosen by a peculiar father, has always set her apart. When her father dies, Noel chooses to remember him by his commitment to the people--despite widespread corruption, he chose to act honorably and spent years waiting for a promotion within the government that would never come. In his memory, Noel dedicates herself to helping others. She gets an education, becomes a teacher, and develops personal relationships with her young students from a poor black neighborhood in Kingston. One day, struggling with her desire to get married, she decides to present a gift to one of her students. Just before Christmastime, Noel brings a doll to Becka's mother, who politely accepts a toy her daughter will have no time to play with. Neither of them could predict the tragedy to come. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Thomas MacDermot's Becka's Buckra Baby is a classic of English literature reimagined for modern readers.

When the SS Empire Windrush berthed at Tilbury docks in 1948 with 492 ex-servicemen from the Caribbean, it marked the beginning of the post-war migrations to Britain that would form part of modern, multi-cultural Britain. A significant role in this social transformation would be played by the literary and non-literary output of writers from the Caribbean. These writers in exile were responsible not just for the establishment of the West Indian novel, but, by virtue of their location in the Mother Country, were also the pioneers of black writing in Britain. Over the next fifty years, this writing would come to represent an important body of work intimately aligned to the evolving and contentious notions of 'home' as economic migration became a permanent presence. In this book, David Ellis provides in-depth analyses of six key figures whose writing charts the establishment of black Britain. For Sam Selvon, George Lamming, and E. R. Braithwaite, writing home represents a literature of reappraisal as the myths of empire -- the gold-paved streets of London -- conflict with the harsh realities of being designated an immigrant. The unresolved consequences of this reappraisal are made evident in the works of Andrew Salkey, Wilson Harris, and Linton Kwesi Johnson where radicalism in both political and literary terms can be read as a response to the rejection of the black communities by an increasingly divided Britain in the 1970s. Finally, the novels of Caryl Phillips, Joan Riley, and David Dabydeen mark an increasingly reflective literature as the notion of home shifts more explicitly from the Caribbean to Britain itself. Containing both contextual and biographical information throughout, "Writing Home" represents a literary and social history of the emergence of black Britain in the second half of the twentieth century.

It is commonly assumed that Caribbean culture is split into elite highbrow culture--which is considered derivative of Europe--and authentic working-class culture, which is often identified with such iconic island activities as salsa, carnival, calypso, and reggae. This book recovers a middle ground, a genuine popular culture in the English-speaking Caribbean that stretches back into the nineteenth century. It shows that popular novels, beauty pageants, and music festivals are examples of Caribbean culture that are mostly created, maintained, and consumed by the Anglophone middle class. Much of middle-class culture is further gendered as "female": women are more apt to be considered recreational readers of fiction, for example, and women's behavior outside the home is often taken as a measure of their community's respectability. The book also highlights the influence of American popular culture, especially African American popular culture, as early as the nineteenth century.

This book tells the story of how intellectuals in the English-speaking Caribbean first created a distinctly Caribbean and national literature. As traditionally told, this story begins in the 1950s with the arrival and triumph of V.S. Naipaul, George Lamming, and their peers in the London literary scene. However, Afro-Caribbeans were writing literature already in the 1840s as part of larger movements for political rights, economic opportunity, and social status. Rosenberg offers a history of this first one hundred years of anglophone Caribbean literature and a critique of Caribbean literary studies that explains its neglect. A historically contextualized study of both canonical and noncanonical writers, this book makes the case that the few well-known Caribbean writers from this earlier period, Claude McKay, Jean Rhys, and C.L.R. James, participated in a larger Caribbean literary movement that directly contributed to the rise of nationalism in the region. This movement reveals the prominence of Indian and other immigrant groups, of feminism, and of homosexuality in the formation of national literatures.

Why did the novel take such a long time to emerge in the colonial world? And, what cultural work did it come to perform in societies where subjects were not free and modes of social organization diverged from the European cultural centers where the novel gained its form and audience? Answering these questions and more, Volume 11, The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean since 1950 explores the institutions of cultural production that exerted influence in late colonialism, from missionary schools and metropolitan publishers to universities and small presses. How these structures provoke and respond to the literary trends and social peculiarities of Africa and the Caribbean impacts not only the writing and reading of novels in those regions, but also has a transformative effect on the novel as a global phenomenon. Together, the volume's 32 contributing experts tell a story about the close relationship between the novel and the project of decolonization, and explore the multiple ways in which novels enable readers to imagine communities beyond their own and thus made this form of literature a compelling catalyst for cultural transformation. The authors show that, even as the novel grows in Africa and the Caribbean as a mark of the elites' mastery of European form, it becomes the essential instrument for critiquing colonialism and for articulating the new horizons of cultural nationalism. Within this historical context, the volume examines works by authors such as Chinua Achebe, Nadine Gordimer, George Lamming, Jamaica Kincaid, V.S. Naipaul, Zoe Wicomb, J. M. Coetzee, and many others.