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This chapter analyzes Dionne Brand’s poetry collection, Chronicles of the Hostile Sun (1984), and her novel In Another Place, Not Here (1996). While Chronicles pinpoints the misrepresentation of the Grenada Revolution in anti-revolutionary narratives emanating from American imperialism, In Another Place highlights how structures of healing and alternative epistemologies of black radicalism are developed between queer women who are on the margins of both the postcolonial Caribbean nation and the revolution intended to subvert American imperialist forces. Brand’s writing interrogates the black radical tradition in search of a radical feminist politics that can account for gender and sexuality alongside race and class.

Chapter Three examines the influence of FR Leavis, architect of the Great Tradition, on the thinking of Kamau Brathwaite and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, two of the leading theorists of postcolonial literature. The chapter argues that Leavis's emphasis on a "living language," as he called it - that is, his belief that a robust spoken dialect is the basis of any great literary tradition - would be rearticulated by Brathwaite and Ngũgĩ in their calls for vernacular literature. The chapter goes on to discuss the close but fractious connections between the English department and postcolonial literature, arguing that Leavis's complex professional relationship with the discipline was one of his major bequests to postcolonial studies.

Chapter Four examines the BBC's role as a major patron of Caribbean writing in the 1950s and 60s through Caribbean Voices, a weekly literary program. Using extensive archival sources, this chapter argues that the BBC served both imperialist and anti-imperialist agendas at the same time. Although the BBC, through its overseas programming, was designed to maintain a cultural empire of English speakers, Caribbean writers used the organization for their own purposes, allowing them to subtly criticize metropolitan dominance. Additionally, important "Windrush" writers such as George Lamming, VS Naipaul, and Sam Selvon parlayed their experience at the BBC into concrete professional opportunities in London.

As a means of situating the correlative concepts of authenticity and identity within the historical context of the region, the Introduction discusses the frustrated notion of origins in the French Caribbean and the inherent obstacles faced in negotiating a murky, ambivalent, (pre)colonial past. After an initial assessment and discussion of what the authors of Éloge de la Créolité describe as the “domination of an elsewhere”—the external forces to which the colonized is subject as a direct result of the colonial project—critical attention is devoted to the different means of identity-building that have been proposed by French-Caribbean authors and critics. In subsequently asserting that “reading structure” in the region’s vibrant literature corpus illustrates well how endeavors of authenticity in the French Caribbean might be both conceived and realized in literary terms, the chapter concludes by clarifying the dual methodological approach (architectural and architextual) that constitutes the framework of analysis for this book.

As a means of illustrating the central albeit conflicted place that issues of authenticity occupy in the French Caribbean, Chapter 3 examines Guadeloupean Maryse Condé’s canonical novel, Traversée de la Mangrove (1989). Consideration of the somewhat heated discussion of Caribbean authenticity prompted by Patrick Chamoiseau’s public reading of Condé’s novel, in evidencing the authors’ stark differences of opinion on the matter, also serves to further inform the fundamentally identitarian dilemmas surrounding the construction of French-Caribbean expression. Subsequent close textual analysis of Traversée de la Mangrove on two distinct architextual and architectural levels illustrates how issues of authenticity are divulged and addressed in the text. Additional consideration of the novel’s architextual properties—in particular with respect to Haitian Jacques Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la Rosée (1944)—leads, in conclusion, to an examination of the architectural significance of the house that Condé’s main character inhabits and in which he undertakes the (metatextual) project of writing a novel entitled Traversée de la Mangrove.

As a colonial subject and woman of colour, Una Marson occupies a unique place in the history of wartime broadcasting in Britain. Her weekly programCalling the West Indies began as a “message home” program for Caribbean soldiers stationed in the UK but grew, as the war progressed, into a literary and cultural forum for writers from across the Black Atlantic. Though barred from advocating openly for independence, Marson used her program to promote West Indian cultural autonomy by spotlighting emerging Caribbean literary figures and forging connections with activists and intellectuals from the U.S., Britain, Africa, and elsewhere. Beyond building such transatlantic networks, Calling the West Indies afforded listeners in the Caribbean the first opportunities to hear literature spoken in the West Indian forms of English which Edward Kamau Brathwaite would go on to call “nation language.” By focusing on Marson’s wartime work, this chapter rectifies a persistent tendency, in histories of Caribbean literature and broadcasting, to omit not only the central role played by this progressive feminist intellectual, but also the role of the war itself as catalyst to the postwar literary renaissance in the West Indies.

Chapter Seven examines the evolution of Jean Rhys's long and unusual career. In the 1920s and 30s, Rhys was a typical member of the expatriate artist community of the Left Bank. In the 1940s and 50s, however, she disappeared, staging an improbable comeback in the 1960s, culminating in the release of Wide Sargasso Sea and the republication of her earlier fiction. In those intervening years, however, a number of high-profile Caribbean writers had come to the attention of metropolitan critics and audiences. This chapter situates Rhys's changing depictions of racial difference in this long context, exploring the subtle continuities and equally subtle differences between her interwar fiction and her postcolonial writing.

Chapter 4 considers issues of identity in the context of hurricane Hugo’s gale force winds and rain battering a house and its solitary inhabitant in Guadeloupe, as recounted in the third and final novel of Daniel Maximin’s Caribbean trilogy, L’Île et une nuits (1995). The chapter focuses initially on both implicit and explicit architextual elements of the novel, including Les Mille et une nuits and Traversée de la Mangrove, as well as the contractual assumptions involved in so far as the novel’s role as the trilogy’s final installment. Subsequently, it is argued that the necessarily conditional resistance to external forces exhibited over the course of the storm by the protagonist’s house, Les Flamboyants, can be interpreted as a Caribbean architectural archetype akin to identity-building in the region. This dual architextual-architectural reading leads, in conclusion, to reflections on the outcomes of insularity and the assertion that Les Flamboyants’s survival, destruction and potential reconstruction reveal, on a larger scale, the complex and ongoing negotiations of identity at stake in the French Caribbean.

By way of a brief summary of Ulysses’ return from Troy to Ithaca in Homer’s The Odyssey, the Conclusion begins by juxtaposing the fundamentally different notions of the house as found in traditional epic narratives—the mythes fondateurs of which Édouard Glissant is so wary—and the literatures of the French Caribbean. The static, unchanging nature of Ulysses’ home, as well as the tree whose literal roots remain part of its construction, are what allow him to reclaim his identity and be duly recognized. Whereas the Caribbean house plays a no less integral role in the negotiation and construction of identity, the architectural and architextual analyses of previous chapters are revisited as a means of illustrating that such identity-building is, in the French Caribbean, a necessarily long and arduous process. In conclusion, the dual methodological lenses of architecture and architexture are demonstrated to be informative critical tools with which to gauge the dynamic notion of constructing identity—a near-cyclical processes of destruction and/or reassessment followed by subsequent (re)construction that, while by nature not absolute, is no less defining of a people’s perceptions and expressions of place and self.

This chapter focuses mainly on Daniel Maximin’s L’Ile et une nuit but also makes reference to the author’s other two novels, L’Isolé soleil and Soufrières. Britton foregrounds how, in L’Ile et une nuit, the community of Guadeloupe is defined in relation to the forces of nature, and also by its capacity to resist them.

Whereas, on the heels of a devastating hurricane’s passing, the final pages of Maximin’s L’Île et une nuit (Chapter 4) hint at both architectural and architextual (re)building in the wake of catastrophe, Chapter 5 examines two works by Haitian Yanick Lahens that directly address the task of (re)construction in the aftermath of large-scale destruction. The chapter begins with a discussion of so-called writings of disaster (Jenson) that have, from the early days of colonization to the present, cast Haiti in a negative, counter-productive light. To the contrary, as a creative counter-discourse to discourses of disaster, literary works from Haiti can be understood as literature of reconstruction. As a phenomenon that is by no means new to Haiti, literature of reconstruction is conceptualized not only as a blueprint or framework for reassessment and rebuilding in/of Haiti, but is demonstrated to constitute, in and of itself, an example of the very reconstruction of which it speaks. In this light, close readings of Lahens’s post-earthquake texts Failles (2010) and Guillaume et Nathalie (2013) illustrate the architextuality of Haitian literature and how, precisely, this vibrant body of works embodies both the path and potential for identity-building in the French Caribbean.

This chapter explores the central theme of community in a close reading of Jacques Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la rosée. It foregrounds the novel’s embodiment of an ideal of organic community and analyses the act of re-building and restoring communal unity. Britton also looks at the success of Gouverneurs de la rosée, labelling it as one of the founding texts of Caribbean literature, and foregrounds what this means in terms of its consequent influence and power.

This chapter explores Le Quatrième Siècle’s reflections on the conceptions of community and individual, which are required by a struggle for political independence, Caribbean solidarity, and cultural autonomy. Also discussed in this chapter is Edouard Glissant’s position as a philosopher, with a comment on the prominence of opacity in Glissant’s thinking. Like many of the other chapters in this study, Britton compares the work of Glissant to that of the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s.

This chapter highlights Desirada’s opposition between the breakdown of the biological family unit and the contrastingly positive strength of relationships not based on biological kinship: friendship and surrogate parent-child relationships. The chapter also explores marginalized, heterogeneous communities, while foregrounding the representation of Guadeloupe and Martinique as ideal organic communities free from alienation and depersonalization.

This chapter provides a close reading of Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle, and portrays the rural Antillean community’s inability to derive any emotional strength from the past. The chapter discusses characters within the novels’ own changing ideas and attitude towards community, and explores the ways in which role models find their place.