Bridges Across Chasms brings together twenty-nine contributors from seventeen different countries, both established writers and newcomers to the field, who explore transculturality and Caribbean Literature from a wide array of perspectives. The volume opens with contributions by Wilson Harris, Caryl Phillips and Lawrence Scott. They are followed by discussions of major Caribbean novelists or poets, covering almost half a century of Caribbean writing. While some articles provide textual analyses, others offer a more theoretical reflection on such concepts as the Black Atlantic, the diaspora, postmodernism and metafiction, the representation of hybridity, the question of subjectivity, and creolization.

Table of contents

Bénédicte LEDENT
Introduction

Wilson HARRIS
Canaima: An Overturning of Habits of Mind in Profoundest Trials of the Imagination

Caryl PHILLIPS
The 'High Anxiety' of Belonging

Lawrence SCOTT
'Extravagant Strangers': Contribution to a Round Table Discussion

Tone BRULIN
Theatre of the Flying Fish

Paget HENRY
The Future of the Post-Colonial Subject: Sylvia Wynter and Wilson Harris

Andrew JEFFERSON-MILES
Tribe and Territory, Masque and Conspiratorial Time

Eimer PAGE
Historical Consciousness in the Writings of Wilson Harris and Edouard Glissant

Gemma ROBINSON
Redemptive Strategies in Wilson Harris's Jonestown and Martin Carter's Poems of Affinity

Taiwo Adetunji OSINUBI
Beyond the 'Global Conversation Babble': Diasporic Conversations in Caryl Phillips's Higher Ground

Ulla RAHBEK
Caryl Phillips's A State of Independence: Character, Country, Conflict

Petra TOURNAY
Re-Telling the Past: Metafictional Elements in Caryl Phillips's Diasporic Narratives

Bénédicte ALLIOT
Transcultural Visions in V.S. Naipaul's Fiction: Looking for a Way in the World in Recent Naipaul

John Clement BALL
Towards a Transcultural London: Early West Indian Fiction and the Metropolis

Ian DIEFFENTHALLER
Locating Linton Kwesi Johnson in a West Indian British Context

Bruce KING
Mike Phillips and the Making of Black British Literature

Valérie BADA
Peculiar Sites of Amnesia: Recovering the 'Eclipsed Figures of the Past' in Francis Quamina Farrier's The Slave and the Scroll and Michael Gilkes's Couvade

Nuria CASADO
An Imaginative Return, a Hybrid Agon, a Polyphonic Redemption: Syncretism in Edgar White's Redemption Song

Claudia EPPERT
(Un)Learning Home: Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow, Emmanuel Levinas, and an Ethics of Reading for Alterity

Kathleen GYSSELS
Caribbean Waves: the Oppressed Language as Language of the Oppressed in Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow and André & Simone Schwarz-Bart's Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes

Margarete KEULEN
From Silence to the Fragmented Self: Michelle Cliff's and Edward Kamau Brathwaite's Subject Constitution in Literature and Non-fictional Prose

Isabel HOVING
Gardening in the Jungles of Post-Coloniality: Representing Multiculturality and Hybridity

Mari PEEPRE
Home, Hybridity, and the Caribbean Diasporas

Maarit FORDE
'Comin' All the Way from Africa Land': Global Cosmology of a Local Religion

Marlies GLASER
Of Peas And Pears: Translating Caribbean Creoles into German

Donald WELLMAN
Emergent Subjectivity and the Transgressive Text

Anne-Julia ZWIERLEIN
'Untamed Reluctance' and a Way Out: The Milton Tradition in Working-Class and Post-Colonial Perspectives

Gordon COLLIER
A Disunified Field Theory of Creolization?

Maria Cristina FUMAGALLI
Bridges Across Chasms: Derek Walcott's The Bounty and Creolization

Christine PAGNOULLE
In Memory of Amryl Johnson