Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature

Simon Gikandi argues that Caribbean literature, and postcolonial writing more generally, has a difficult relationship with the ideas of modernism and modernity. A Caribbean writer cannot step outside a history shaped by Europe, so the task becomes rewriting that history from within.

Drawing on contemporary deconstructionist theory, the book looks closely at writers including George Lamming, Samuel Selvon and Alejo Carpentier. Each is read for the way he handles the inheritance of European modernism, and for the new forms that result.

Readers of Caribbean and postcolonial literature, and of modernist studies more broadly, will find the argument useful for placing these writers within a wider literary conversation.

Publisher: Cornell University Press. ISBN-13: 9781501719905.