New Crossings: Native and Other Lands in Caribbean Migration Narratives

This interdisciplinary study focuses on recent migrant literature by five outstanding authors from the anglophone, francophone and hispanophone Caribbean: Maryse Condé, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Díaz, Curdella Forbes and Caryl Phillips. Anthea Morrison offers a unique focus on Caribbean migration from a diverse corpus of texts. The analysis emphasizes the importance of travelling in the Caribbean imaginary and the discourse of identity and offers close readings of several “migrant narratives”.

Care is taken to underline the specificity of the national contexts which inform the work of each author, despite the manifest commonalities they share as Caribbean writers, and further, to illustrate the heterogeneity of Caribbean thought. The analysis seeks to demonstrate that Caribbean migrant literature is far from monolithic, not only because of inevitable sociopolitical and historical differences between the distinctive territories but also because of the singularities of temperament and experience which shape the attitudes of individual writers vis-à-vis the land left behind.

At a time when, both regionally and internationally, issues of multiculturalism, migrancy and an apparent resurgence of nativism are topics of urgent discussion, New Crossings brings timely focus to the continuing importance of migration in Caribbean experience and in Caribbean literature.