Periodicals played a significant role in the development of the region’s nationalist literature and politics. The Jamaican newspaper Public Opinion in 1938 helped launch the People’s National Party. Edna Manley, the editor of Focus, was part of Jamaica’s key political families. The magazines Bim in Barbados and Kyk-over-al in Guyana supported the growth of a West Indian literary tradition in the decades leading to independence. Yet the periodical culture of the region was more diverse and contradictory than a focus on these key periodicals demonstrates. Considering a wider body of magazines such as the Caribbean Post and West Indian Review in Jamaica; the Barbadian Forum and the Outlook; or the literary magazine Trinidad and its contemporary The Caribbee, among others, shows the range of periodical projects circulating in the early decades of the twentieth century. These magazines were a key forum through which the West Indian middle classes negotiated the process of cultural decolonization. As well as building cultural and political literacy, the magazines through their pages, competitions, and reviews produced and printed a literary culture both by, and for, Caribbean readers and writers – one which is importantly distinct from the later market-driven publishers working to promote Caribbean literature from the metropole.

The conventional account of anglophone Caribbean writing from the nationalist period often tends to focus on male writers. Early articulations of a Caribbean literary tradition overlooked many writers, especially women, who did not fit into the frameworks of canon-builders like Kamau Brathwaite and Kenneth Ramchand. Almost up to the end of the 1970s, Jean Rhys remained the single widely known woman author, while a generation of writers who were arguably closer to changing Caribbean realities were neglected. During the past twenty years, scholarship on Caribbean writing has sought to recuperate these writers and take seriously their contributions, addressing how these might challenge conventional accounts of Caribbean literary cultures and characteristics. The result has been an expanded sense of the aesthetic and political projects of the period – a period marked by significant sociopolitical change in countries increasingly asserting cultural specificities and moving towards political autonomy. This essay focuses on five early anglophone Caribbean women writers of diverse backgrounds: Phyllis Shand Allfrey, Amy Jacques Garvey, Una Marson, Elma Napier, and Sylvia Wynter. While making different aesthetic choices, these authors gave passionate voice to the dominant concerns of their time – in particular the anticolonial struggle, socioeconomic disparities, and racial/cultural identity – as well as articulating issues of gender.

Very little has been written on Anglophone Caribbean theatre (the few publications include work by Judy Stone, Errol Hill, Richardson Wright, Rex Nettleford, and Wycliffe and Hazel Bennett). As for theatre from the French-speaking Caribbean, it also remains an understudied field. A few book-length studies (Bérard, Sahakian, Artheron) on theatre from the French Caribbean (Martinique, Guadeloupe. and French Guyana) have emerged in recent years; however, the extraordinary and rich theatre tradition of Haiti has been almost entirely neglected by scholars and critics of Caribbean theatre. Yet drama, in the form of dance theatre, music theatre, various forms of ritual theatre, political theatre, and national pantomimes, has not only been at the heart of the Caribbean literary and cultural sensibility. The genre in its various forms has played a major role in nationalist movements across the Caribbean, and in attempts at cultural decolonization viewed as indispensable to processes of political and social decolonization. This paper focuses on ritual theatre during the decades of the 1930s to the 1970s in the English- and French-speaking Caribbean, an era in playwriting and staging marked by returns to the Haitian Revolution; major investments in history; ancestral recuperation; politics and traditional culture; and cultural decolonization through the project of rewriting colonial narratives. I argue that ritual theatrical forms, enlisting Afro-derived Caribbean ontologies, reflected the importance of the sacred in affecting the material conditions of existence in the colonized post-slavery societies of the Caribbean.

Caribbean writing from the 1920s to the 1940s has not always received as much attention as the work published in England during the 1950s and 1960s. Close examination of this earlier period, however, illustrates that a wide range of fiction and poetry was published, much of it articulating aspects of a nationalist and anticolonialist perspective even as other projects arose from alternative historical contexts. Focusing on the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s also makes visible the generic and geographical diversity: poems, poetic anthologies, short fiction, and novels were written and published throughout the islands as well as in England and the United States. As a result, this early twentieth-century writing represents the range of contexts to which Caribbean writing responded: the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution; migration within the region and into metropolitan locations; the Harlem Renaissance; Marxism; attention to local ecologies that also critiques the spread of global capital; the rise of US imperialism in the region; the Great Depression; and the crisis of the British Empire beginning with the labour unrest of the mid-1930s. Consideration of single works and anthologies from the 1920s to the 1940s exposes the tensions between an indigenous consciousness and concepts of literary form imposed or absorbed at the junction of empire, migration, and coloniality.