During and after the two World Wars, a cohort of Caribbean authors migrated to the UK and France. Dissecting writers like Lamming, Césaire, and Glissant, McIntosh reveals how these Caribbean writers were pushed to represent themselves as authentic spokesmen for their people, coming to represent the concerns of the emigrant intellectual community.

This is an historically comparative postcolonial study asserting the dialogic relation between Irish and Caribbean narrative form. The book focuses on the demise of empire and the role of geography in creating an 'island imaginary' for writers from James Joyce to Jamaica Kincaid.

Winner of the 2018 Gordon K. and Sybil Farrell Lewis Award for the best book in Caribbean studies from the Caribbean Studies Association This book tells a distinct story of Indians in the Caribbean--one concentrated not only on archival records and institutions, but also on the voices of the people and the ways in which they define themselves and the world around them. Through oral history and ethnography, Lomarsh Roopnarine explores previously marginalized Indians in the Caribbean and their distinct social dynamics and histories, including the French Caribbean and other islands with smaller South Asian populations. He pursues a comparative approach with inclusive themes that cut across the Caribbean. In 1833, the abolition of slavery in the British Empire led to the import of exploited South Asian indentured workers in the Caribbean. Today India bears little relevance to most of these Caribbean Indians. Yet, Caribbean Indians have developed an in-between status, shaped by South Asian customs such as religion, music, folklore, migration, new identities, and Bollywood films. They do not seem akin to Indians in India, nor are they like Caribbean Creoles, or mixed-race Caribbeans. Instead, they have merged India and the Caribbean to produce a distinct, dynamic local entity. The book does not neglect the arrival of nonindentured Indians in the Caribbean since the early 1900s. These people came to the Caribbean without an indentured contract or after indentured emancipation but have formed significant communities in Barbados, the US Virgin Islands, and Jamaica. Drawing upon over twenty-five years of research in the Caribbean and North America, Roopnarine contributes a thorough analysis of the Indo-Caribbean, among the first to look at the entire Indian diaspora across the Caribbean.

Since 1965, West Indians have been emigrating to the United States in record numbers, and to New York City in particular. Caribbean New York shows how the new immigration is reshaping American race relations and sheds much-needed light on factors that underlie some of the city's explosive racial confrontations. Philip Kasinitz examines how two forces--racial solidarity and ethnic distinctiveness--have helped to shape the identity of New York's West Indian community. He compares "new" (post-1965) immigrants with West Indians who arrived earlier in the century, and looks in detail at the economic, political, and cultural rules that Afro-Caribbean immigrants have played in the city during each period.

A compelling and intricate novel of emigration and the effects of colonialism on a people

During and after the two World Wars, a cohort of Caribbean authors migrated to the UK and France. Dissecting writers like Lamming, Césaire, and Glissant, McIntosh reveals how these Caribbean writers were pushed to represent themselves as authentic spokesmen for their people, coming to represent the concerns of the emigrant intellectual community.