In the opening story, sharply observed details of a walk through a St Lucian coastal town to an ageing uncle's house, chance encounters that trigger memories, a cell-phone call from home in Trinidad, the way an incident--like refusing a lift on the way to the house--becomes part of the enlivening narrative of the day, all cover with the myriad details of pulsing life what is really a story about mourning the death of the character's mother. In this, and a sequence of stories that chart the playful delights of childhood family holidays with uncles, aunts, and cousins and the break-up of those connections through deaths and the passage of time, there is a fine balance between recording the feelings of desolation and the pleasures of reconstructing the joys of the past through art and memory. The collection, through its careful organisation of individual stories into an artfully constructed whole, offers a richly consoling passage through griefs of various kinds towards a sense of continuance and human resilience.

Her daughter Ruthie's easy ascent through school and university has been Mrs. B's pride and joy for some time. But as the novel begins, she and her husband Charles are on their way to the airport to collect Ruthie, who has disgraced herself with a married man and a suicide attempt, and is, as they will soon discover, pregnant. Loosely inspired by Flaubert's Madame Bovary, the novel focuses on the life of an upper-middle-class family in a contemporary Trinidad that is turbulent with violence and popular dissatisfactions, in response to which the family have retreated to a gated community. Mrs. B (she hates the name of Butcher) is fast approaching 50, and Ruthie's return and the state of her marriage provoke her to some unaccustomed self-reflection. Much like Flaubert's heroine, Mrs. B's longings are diffuse but bounded by the assumptions of her social circle. And without ever losing sympathy for Mrs. B and her family, the novel asks some tough questions about what resources Mrs. B. can bring to her "issues" and how she can find meaning in her life. And what of Ruthie? Can her greater openness to the island challenge her easy acceptance of privilege? Behind both women is the complex and fascinating figure of Aunt Claire, the family's reader, who has provided the only real nurture in Mrs. B's life. Can she do the same for Ruthie? But, then, how far does her deep immersion in books really equip her for 21st-century Trinidadian life?

This brief biography looks at one of the most influential writers from the francophone Caribbean. Aime Cesaire was a poet, playwright and politician, who, along with Leon-Gontran Damas from French Guiana and Leopold Senghor of Senegal, founded the Negritude movement in the 1930s. The men had come together as young black students in Paris at a time when the French capital had become the locus of ideas on black identity and pan-Africanism. The Negritude movement called for a cultural awakening of African heritage, a rejection of Western ideology that inherently saw blacks as inferior to whites, and a reclamation of what it meant to be black. Cesaire's first major and most famous poetic work, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to My Native Land), explored the contours of this African heritage and his complex identity as a black man born under French rule on the Caribbean island of Martinique. Throughout his long political career, which lasted for most of his life, Cesaire fought not only for his own people but for those who had been wronged by vestiges of colonial regimes. This book is an exploration of Cesaire's life in his never-ending decolonizing battle.

In the introduction to Methods in Caribbean Research, the editors ask, "What sets the Caribbean apart and justifies an application of scholarly method to its own needs? What defines the world of Caribbean letters? Why not merely apply established approaches to scholarship that work satisfactorily in Western metropoles?" The chapters in this collection address these pressing questions and make a unique contribution to the available guides for Caribbean scholars and students of Caribbean studies both inside and outside the region. The authors consider the distinctive needs of research in Caribbean literature, language and culture and focus on honing research methods relevant to Caribbean material and with the insights of the Caribbean experience. The essays in the first part, Research Methodology, examine conceptual frames, data collection, and application and analysis of research. The second part details the research process, from proposal to proofreading. Throughout, the authors emphasise a Caribbean approach that is engaged with and aware of a range of existing theories but does not uncritically adopt external frameworks that are inadequate for a rounded Caribbean critical practice. Contributors: Jean Antoine-Dunne, Beatrice Boufoy-Bastick, Merle Hodge, Barbara Lalla, Paula Morgan, Jennifer Rahim, Nicole Roberts, Louis Regis, Jairo Sanchez-Galvis, Geraldine Skeete, Glenroy Taitt, Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, Valerie Youssef.

Literature has no geographical border and can so easily relocate and migrate into our literary imagination. The only real difficulty facing such crossings is the ever-present language barriers that have for too long limited the ways in which the Caribbean is read, perceived and interpreted. What is distinctive about Border Crossings: A Trilingual Anthology of Caribbean Women Writers is its trilingual nature; all of the stories appear in English, French and Spanish. To date, no anthology of short stories from the Caribbean region has accomplished this.The anthology includes stories from Guadeloupe (Gisele Pineau), Trinidad ( Shani Mootoo), Haiti (Yanick Lahens), Jamaica (Oliver Senior), Puerto Rico (Carmen Lugo Filippi ) and Cuba (Mirta Yanez). Many stories in the collection do not offer the reader a comforting end. Instead, they suggest the possibilities and the complexities of depicting a Caribbean, not singular but plural, not closed but open-ended and decidedly one without borders.

The bicentenary of Haitian independence in 2004 triggered a renewed interest in Haitian history and culture. In many ways, however, much work is still required in this fertile field. Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution and Its Cultural Aftershocks, the first collection of essays edited by Martin Munro and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, addressed the repercussions of the Haitian Revolution in Haiti, the Caribbean, North America and Europe. This present volume develops and complements the previous collection to meet the growing demand for original scholarly work on Haiti. Widening the cultural lens to include diasporic studies, art, and questions of race and gender, Echoes of the Haitian Revolution exposes how the history of Haiti has shaped our ideas of race, nation and civilization in ways that we are often unaware of. Haiti's lessons continue to engage us in a dynamic dialog that compels us to question and revisit received arguments. The essays collected here provoke and stimulate these necessary conversations by approaching the legacies and repercussions of the revolution from a cultural perspective.