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"This edited collection challenges a long sacrosanct paradigm. Since the establishment of Caribbean literary studies, scholars have exalted an elite cohort of émigré novelists based in postwar London, a group often referred to as "the Windrush writers" in tribute to the SS Empire Windrush, whose 1948 voyage from Jamaica inaugurated large-scale Caribbean migration to London. In critical accounts this group is typically reduced to the canonical troika of V.S. Naipaul, George Lamming, and Sam Selvon, effectively treating these three authors as the tradition's founding fathers. These "founders" have been properly celebrated for producing a complex, anticolonial, nationalist literature. However, their canonization has obscured the great diversity of postwar Caribbean writers, producing an enduring but narrow definition of West Indian literature. Beyond Windrush stands out as the first book to reexamine and redefine the writing of this crucial era. Its fourteen original essays make clear that in the 1950s there was already a wide spectrum of West Indian men and women--Afro-Caribbean, Indo-Caribbean, and white-creole--who were writing, publishing, and even painting. Many lived in the Caribbean and North America, rather than London. Moreover, these writers addressed subjects overlooked in the more conventionally conceived canon, including topics such as queer sexuality and the environment. This collection offers new readings of canonical authors (Lamming, Roger Mais, and Andrew Salkey); hitherto marginalized authors (Ismith Khan, Elma Napier, and John Hearne); and commonly ignored genres (memoir, short stories, and journalism)."-- Cover -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Looking Beyond Windrush -- Part One: Negotiating National Belonging -- Indianness and Nationalism in the Windrush Era -- Contradictory Omens: Repatriation and Resistance in Ismith Khan's The Jumbie Bird -- Between Windrush and Wolfenden: Class Crossings and Queer Desire in Andrew Salkey's Postwar London -- Part Two: Genre and Gender -- Rescripting Anglophone Caribbean Women's Literary History: Gender, Genre, and Lost Caribbean Voices -- "Neither Pathological nor Perfect": Joyce Gladwell's Late Autobiographical Challenge to the Windrush Generation -- Elma Napier's Literary Sense of Place -- Part Three: The Politics of Literary Production and Reception -- The BBC's Caribbean Voices and Its "Critics' Circle": Radio Criticism and the Development of Anglophone Caribbean Literature -- John Hearne's Plantation Fantasy -- John Hearne: Beyond the Plantation -- Part Four: Alternate Geographies -- Kingston Calling: Mais's Paris, 1954 -- Marie Chauvet and the Writer's Exile from the Postcolonial Public Sphere -- Beyond Windrush and the Original Black Atlantic Routes: Austin Clarke, Race, and Canada's Influence on Anglophone Caribbean Literature -- Federated Ocean States: Archipelagic Visions of the Third World at Midcentury -- Epilogue: Coming of Age in the Fifties -- Contributors -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- W -- X.
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