This collection takes as its starting point the ubiquitous representation of various forms of mental illness, breakdown and psychopathology in Caribbean writing, and the fact that this 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 contributions to this volume demonstrate that much remains to be done in rethinking the trope of "madness" across Caribbean literature by local and diaspora writers. This book asks how focusing on literary manifestations of apparent mental aberration can extend our understanding of Caribbean narrative and culture, and can help us to interrogate 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. 

Table of contents

“Madness Is Rampant on This Island”: Writing Altered States in Anglophone Caribbean Literature
Bénédicte Ledent, Evelyn O’Callaghan, and Daria Tunca

“Kingston Full of Them”: Madwomen at the Crossroads
Kelly Baker Josephs

“Fighting Mad to Tell Her Story”: Madness, Rage, and Literary Self-Making in Jean Rhys and Jamaica Kincaid
Denise deCaires Narain

Madness and Silence in Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore and In the Falling Snow
Ping Su

Speaking of Madness in the First Person/Speaking Madness in the Second Person? Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and “The Cheater’s Guide to Love”
Delphine Munos

What Is “Worse Besides”? An Ecocritical Reading of Madness in Caribbean Literature
Carine M. Mardorossian

Performing Delusional Evil: Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother
Rebecca Romdhani

Horizons of Desire in Caribbean Queer Speculative Fiction: Marlon James’s John Crow’s Devil
Michael A. Bucknor

When Seeing Is Believing: Enduring Injustice in Merle Collins’s The Colour of Forgetting
Alison Donnell

Migrant Madness or Poetics of Spirit? Teaching Fiction by Erna Brodber and Kei Miller
Evelyn O’Callaghan

(Re)Locating Madness and Prophesy: An Interview with Kei Miller
Rebecca Romdhani

Index