General

Abstract

tion for and tension with metropolitan forms; a distinct Afro-Caribbean ethos; the heterogeneity of a Caribbean environment and culture; the foregrounding of women's perspectives and the politics of gender. The inclusion of other crucial material would have enhanced such cross-connections: parts of Omeros, Walcott's essay on mimicry, several of Harris's essays. These pieces are not over-anthologized and would certainly have deepened the new critical configurations that the anthology fosters. We are constantly shown throughout the anthology that Caribbean literature has developed from acts of cross-cultural negotiation. Such a formulation may seem logical in a concept of Caribbean literature as a cultural entity within a certain geographic space. It becomes alarming when it is extended to project a vision of the literature in the 1990s as a literature without a centre, without even a geographic base. The editors see this dispersal as part of a Caribbean experience of mobility, pluralism and relativity over the centuries. This is just where they may be overstating their speculation and running risks (which they have eschewed) of subsuming a unique and diverse literature within a postmodern/postcolonial framework without frontiers. The re-centring of Caribbean literature in a global academy is not the completion but the continuation of a cycle already familiar to the Caribbean. There may yet be a neo-nationalist phase in which the literature may be redefined not in global theoretical terms but as part of a variety of dynamic cultural expressions with a solid base in the region of the Caribbean. The editors appear to envisage such a possibility though they do not state it categorically.