Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze: Literature Between Postcolonialism and Post-Continental Philosophy

Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze maps a new intellectual and literary history of postcolonial Caribbean writing and thought spanning from the 1930s surrealist movement to the present,crossing the region's language blocs, and focused on the interconnected principles of creativity and commemoration.  Exploring the work of René Ménil, Édouard Glissant, Wilson Harris, Derek

Walcott, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Pauline Melville, Robert Antoni and Nalo Hopkinson, this study reveals the explicit and implicit engagement with Deleuzian thought at work in contemporary Caribbean writing.Uniting for the first time two major schools of contemporary thought - postcolonialism and post-continental philosophy - this study establishes a new and innovative critical discourse for Caribbean studies and postcolonial theory beyond the oppositional dialectic of colonizer and colonized. Drawing

from Deleuze's writings on Bergson, Nietzsche and Spinoza, this study interrogates the postcolonial tropes of newness, becoming, relationality and a philosophical concept of immanence that lie at the heart of a little-observed dialogue between contemporary Caribbean writers and Deleuze.

Radically reassesses postcolonial theory in the light of the postcontinental philosophy of Deleuze, through readings of a wide range of contemporary Caribbean writers.

Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze maps a new intellectual and literary history of postcolonial Caribbean writing and thought spanning from the 1930s surrealist movement to the present, crossing the region's language blocs, and focused on the interconnected principles of creativity and commemoration. Exploring the work of René Ménil, Édouard Glissant, Wilson Harris, Derek Walcott, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Pauline Melville, Robert Antoni and Nalo Hopkinson, this study reveals the explicit and implicit engagement with Deleuzian thought at work in contemporary Caribbean writing. Uniting for the first time two major schools of contemporary thought - postcolonialism and post-continental philosophy - this study establishes a new and innovative critical discourse for Caribbean studies and postcolonial theory beyond the oppositional dialectic of colonizer and colonized. Drawing from Deleuze's writings on Bergson, Nietzsche and Spinoza, this study interrogates the postcolonial tropes of newness, becoming, relationality and a philosophical concept of immanence that lie at the heart of a little-observed dialogue between contemporary Caribbean writers and Deleuze.

Lorna Burns is Lecturer in Postcolonial Literatures at the University of St Andrews, UK

Introduction: How Newness Enters the World \ 1. Surrealism and the Caribbean: a Curious Line of Resemblance \ 2. Writing Back to the Colonial Event: Derek Walcott and Wilson Harris \ 3. Édouard Glissant's Poetics of the Chaosmos \ 4. Postcolonial Literature as Health: Robert Antoni and Nalo Hopkinson \ Notes \ Bibliography \ Index