New Article on Colonialism and Languages

Edward Kamau Brathwaite

Edouard Glissant

The latest volume of the online journal Postcolonial Interventions was just published yesterday, and I had an article in it titled “Edouard Glissant’s and Edward Braithwaite’s Appropriations of Colonial Languages.” The article brings together two prominent postcolonial writers who are both from the Caribbean but who are separated by linguistic boundaries (although they knew each other). For perfectly understandable but still unfortunate reasons, Caribbean studies often focus on just one linguistic tradition, and this publication is part of my small effort to bring theory and fiction together across those boundaries and traditions since they have so much in common.

The other articles in this volume of the journal sound even more interesting than mine, particularly Laura Wright’s “‘Go Back to Africa’: Afrocentrism, the 2016 NFL Protests, and Ryan Coogler’s 2018 Black Panther” and Elena Barreca’s “The Oral Heritage and Linguistic Heteroglossia of Post-Colonial Writings: Bob Marley and the Anglophone Caribbean as a Case Study.” Neither of us will read all of the articles, but you should check out at least one of those two!