Nearly every
writer from the Caribbean has a story about a “mad” character - walking the streets, disrupting complacency, revealing certain truths or suffering in silence - and scholars are increasingly examining this pervasive theme in literature from the region.
A new book, Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature:
On the Edge, “takes as its starting point the ubiquitous representation of
various forms of mental illness, breakdown and psychopathology in Caribbean
writing”, according to the editors Bénédicte Ledent, Evelyn O’Callaghan and Daria
Tunca.
In an essay
titled “Madness Is Rampant on This Island”, the three discuss the writing of
“altered states”, while other contributors scrutinize “madness” in the work of
Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, Caryl Phillips, Junot Diaz, and Marlon James, among
several internationally known writers.
A central
concern of the book is “how focusing on literary manifestations of apparent
mental aberration” can extend readers’ understanding of Caribbean narrative and
culture. It also aims to increase questioning of 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”.
The editors
stress that the 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 response
or prequel to Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre by the Dominican-born British
writer.
They add that
the new volume demonstrates “that much remains to be done in rethinking the
trope of ‘madness’ across Caribbean literature by local and diaspora writers”.
The book grew out of a conference held in 2015 at the University of Liège, Belgium, with scholars including Alison Donnell, Rebecca Romdhani, Kelly Baker Josephs, Tobias Schlosser and Ping Su, alongside writers such as Caryl Phillips, Alecia McKenzie, Kei Miller and Desirée Reynolds.
(Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature: On the Edge is published by Palgrave Macmillan. Link: https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783319981796)
The book grew out of a conference held in 2015 at the University of Liège, Belgium, with scholars including Alison Donnell, Rebecca Romdhani, Kelly Baker Josephs, Tobias Schlosser and Ping Su, alongside writers such as Caryl Phillips, Alecia McKenzie, Kei Miller and Desirée Reynolds.
(Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature: On the Edge is published by Palgrave Macmillan. Link: https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783319981796)
