Description
Created in the West Indies: Caribbean Perspectives on V.S. Naipaul updates and furthers the debates on the life and work of an internationally acclaimed writer, Nobel laureate and native son of Trinidad and Tobago. The book draws together the proceedings of a series of outstanding public lectures and an academic symposium that featured a distinguished cadre of Caribbean scholars who, during 2007, participated in a year-long schedule of activities initiated by the University of the West Indies, St Augustine campus, to honour the life and work of this highly accomplished ‘enigma’ of Caribbean letters.
The essays in this collection are organised into three sections that represent a compression of the multifaceted range of V.S. Naipaul’s creative concerns, thematic explorations, even obsessions, and philosophical persuasions. The singular power of these contributions is their ability to push at the borders of Naipaul scholarship, cutting new pathways for considering this most intriguing creative mind and offering fresh perspectives on the now familiar themes of postcolonial identity and nationalism, the fiction of history and history of fiction, home and belonging in a world characterised by flux, movement and cultural contact.
Controversy has always companioned Naipaul’s career. Not surprisingly, some of the contributions are unrelentingly honest in their exposé of Naipaul for his trademark impatience with the very societies that created his unique sensibility and his propensity for self-contradiction.
Contributors:
Jean Antoine-Dunne; Edward Baugh; Bridget Brereton; Gordon Rohlehr; Evelyn O’ Callaghan; Paula Morgan; Rhonda Cobham-Sander; Barbara Lalla; Vijay Maharaj; Jennifer Rahim; Lawrence Scott; Bhoendradatt Tewarie and Sandra Pouchet Paquet.
About the Authors
Jennifer Rahim is a Senior Lecturer in Literature in the Department of Liberal Arts, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago. She is a critic, poet and short story writer. She edited with Barbara Lalla a collection of Cultural Studies essays entitled, Beyond Borders: Cross Culturalism and the Caribbean Canon (UWI Press 2009). She has one collection of short stories, Songster and Other Stories (2007). Her poetry collection Approaching Sabbaths won the 2010 Casa de las Américas Prize for best book in the category Caribbean Literature in English or Creole.
Barbara Lalla is Professor of Language and Literature at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine. She is the author of several books: Postcolonialisms: Caribbean Re-reading of Medieval English Discourse, Defining Jamaican Fiction: Marronage and the Discourse of Survival, as well as the companion volumes, Language in Exile and Voices in Exile. Her first novel, Arch of Fire (1998) has subsequently been translated into German. A past President of The Society for Caribbean Linguistics, a Co-Chair of the Cultural Studies Initiative and a winner of the Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Excellence, she also served the campus as Public Orator for many years.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction – Jennifer Rahim
SECTION 1 – Circuits of Self-Refashioning
- ‘The History that had Made Me’: The Making and Self-Making of V.S. Naipaul – Edward Baugh
- Naipaul’s Legacy: Made in the West Indies – for Export – Evelyn O’Callaghan
- Consorting with Kali: Migration and Identity in Naipaul’s ‘Out of Many’ – Paula Morgan
- Consuming the Self: V.S. Naipaul, C.L.R. James and A Way in the World – Rhonda Cobham-Sander
SECTION 2 – Form Matters
- The Confessional Element in Naipaul’s Fiction – Gordon Rohlehr
- Signifying Nothing: Writing about Not Writing in The Mystic Masseur – Barbara Lalla
- Keeping an Eye on Naipaul: Naipaul and the Play of the Visual – Jean Antoine-Dunne
- A Mala in Obeisance: Hinduism in Selected Texts by V.S. Naipaul – Vijay Maharaj
- The Shadow of Hanuman: V.S. Naipaul and the ‘Unhomely’ House of Fiction – Jennifer Rahim
SECTION 3 – Rethinking Naipaul on the Thresholds of History and New Horizons
- V.S. Naipaul and the Interior Expeditions: ‘It is Impossible to Make a Step Without the Indians – Sandra Pouchet Paquet
- The Novelist and History – Pleasures and Problems: V.S. Naipaul’s The Loss of El Dorado – A History, The Enigma of Arrival – A Novel, and A Way in the World – A Sequence – Lawrence Scott
- V.S. Naipaul as Critical Thinker – Bhoendradatt Tewarie
- Naipaul’s Sense of History – Bridget Brereton
Bibliography
Contributors
Index
