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Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) grew out of a small informal meeting held in a basement flat in Mecklenberg Square, London. Six years later, when CAM as an organisation ended, it had made a major impact on the emergence of a Caribbean cultural identity, particularly in Britain, where it also had changed attitudes within the host community. In Britain, CAM played a significant role in the emergence of a new Caribbean strand in black British culture. The Islands in Between was a slim volume, but it was the first book of criticism on West Indian writing in English, and appeared at the moment when radical Caribbean critics were looking for a crusty piece of colonial writing to get their teeth into. CAM's influence was felt in the visual arts. It also touched the lives of a whole generation of young talent.

This chapter introduces Rohinton Mistry, an Indian author whose work presents a repeated image of various kinds of journeys. It first presents some background information on his childhood and education in Bombay, India, showing that he became a writer almost by accident, and then identifies his sources of inspiration, including his Zoroastrian faith and childhood experiences. The chapter also addresses the controversy over the perceived privileging of Indian writing in English, and Mistry's current place in Canadian literature.

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. This book has attempted to show the return of the cannibal in contemporary Caribbean and Indian Ocean writing, a return that is as much thematic as it is historical, economic, and political. As an archetypal othering trope, cannibalism is considered the antithesis of cosmopolitan ideals, ideals that persistently appeal to the elite for whom international mobility is synonymous with modernity, style, and indulgence. These elitist models of global interactions marginalize the knowledge and wisdom from which Caribbean and Indian Ocean societies draw. Yet through the cannibalistic incorporation of Caribbean and Indian Ocean societies within networks that mark the global world, these societies continue to play a crucial role in processes of transculturation and in the broader processes of cosmopolitan exchanges. It is hoped is that this book has brought together select texts in ways that open up new research directions.

This chapter focuses on Indian historical writing. The end of colonial rule in 1947 was a turning point in Indian historical writing and culture. History emerged as a professional discipline with the establishment of new state-sponsored institutions of research and teaching. Attached to the institutionalization was the political imperative of a newly independent nation in search of a coherent and comprehensive historical narrative to support its nation-building efforts. At the same time, there was a desire to establish an autonomous Indian perspective, free of colonial constraints and distortions. In this, post-independence historiography owed much to earlier strands of nationalist historiography. During the first two decades after independence, three main trajectories of historical writing emerged: an official and largely secular nationalist historiography, a cultural nationalist historiography with strong religious overtones, and a critical Marxist trajectory based on analyses of social forms.

Indian Writing in English (IWE) today boasts of internationally renowned writers, both male and female. In comparison to the vast amount of critical work on contemporary women writers, the roots of Indian women’s fiction in English are still gravely understudied. The aim of this book is partly to fight that amnesia and draw some of the early works by women out from their long, undeserved eclipse.

This chapter examines the Indian novel in English. It is an historical fact that the novel in India developed under the stimulus received from the West; but the potentialities for the novel already existed in Indian modes of storytelling. As early as the seventh century, India had a sophisticated prose literature in Sanskrit. Nevertheless, early novelists in India followed English models like Henry Fielding and Charles Dickens. It is only much later that they developed the confidence to experiment with form. However, the beginnings of Indian English writing are not fully documented. Many books published in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have not been preserved because of the lack of public libraries, the hot and humid Indian climate, and the poor quality of the paper used.

The narratives of revolutionary indigenous Mexico by Todd Downing and Lynn Riggs are a selective but compelling part of the mid-twentieth-century American Indian writing. Recognizing that the imagined Mexico of this period is not essentially revolutionary but multidimensional politically is as important as acknowledging the same about the American Indian civil rights and early renaissance era. This chapter concludes that the literary and intellectual inquiries into American Indian and indigenous Mexican life in the mid-twentieth century affirms local, tribal national, transnational, and continental modes of indigenous belonging in the Americas, and asserts the urgency and desirability of indigenous self-determination in all these contexts.

This chapter explores Indo-Persian historical thoughts and writings spanning the 400 years (1350–1750) of the late medieval and early modern centuries. It traces the Indo-Persian connection back into the Delhi Sultanate (a pre-Mughal state of the thirteenth to early sixteenth centuries). It shows that Indo-Persian historians set themselves a laudable goal in the context of the time and the world they lived in, namely to uphold the ethical and didactic purpose of history-writing. Regardless of their inadequacies, shortcomings, and failings, almost all of them stood their ground.