“Finding the Centre?” Publishing Commonwealth Writing in London: The Case of Anglophone Caribbean Writing 1950-65

Professing the common wealth of literature, Leeds 1957–1969

“…Peter Kalliney's recently published Commonwealth of Letters (2013) works this suggestive seam of thinking first by drawing attention to the high modernist legacies linking writers of the Anglophone Caribbean with their literary counterparts in the English (and also American) metropolis, that enabled for a short time, "concrete forms of [patronage], exchange and reciprocation between London elites and West Indian artists" (2013: 118). Kalliney's assertions are certainly supported by my earlier investigations into discursive and material networks that contributed to the postwar Anglophone Caribbean publishing boom in the UK (Low, 2002(Low, , 2011. Kalliney argues that if these metropolitan writers and critics were engaged in an "instinctive attempt to preserve the tattered remnants of modernist culture in the face of national and imperial decline", both groups were united in "mutually converging anxieties about the proper function of intellectual work " (2013: 118).…”

Tokenism and Its Long-Term Consequences: Evidence from the Literary Field

“…This first wave of what would be known as “commonwealth literature” was fueled by publishers such as Faber & Faber, Hutchinson’s “New Authors” series, Oxford University Press’s “Three Crowns” series, Heinemann Educational’s “African Writers” series, Longman’s “Drumbeat” series, and the BBC’s “Caribbean Voices” radio program, which “functioned like a publishing house” ( Low 2002 :29). This investment in “diversity capital” ( Banks 2022 ) secured reputational accolades for British publishers, but by the mid-1970s and early 1980s the market floundered, as the two financial sources propping it up declined.…”

Entre "Los Placeres Del Exilio" Y Los Descontentos De La Migración: Lucy, Novela De Jamaica Kincaid

“…Carine M. Mardorossian (2002) retoma esta distinción y la hace extensiva al Caribe francés. La primera generación de escritores del Caribe anglófono y francófono se formó en las metrópolis coloniales --Londres y París, respectivamente--que en la primera mitad del siglo XX se convirtieron en lugares de encuentro de autores ansiosos por acceder al tipo de autoridad literaria asociada con Cambridge y Oxford (Edmonson, 1999) y a las oportunidades editoriales y de difusión de las que carecían en las islas de origen (Low 2002). Los exiliados formaban parte, por lo general, de ese sector de las sociedades coloniales que recibía una educación occidental que buscaba "asimilarlos" a la cultura metropolitana y del que se esperaba que actuara como intermediario entre el poder colonizador y la masa de colonizados.…”