ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned to continue the discussion of neglected texts and the mapping of literary history around certain ‘critical moments’ in which the demands of one particular methodology or ideology have dominated critical interests and clearly privileged one construction of a Caribbean literary archive over others. My particular focus here is on the strong purchase that a black diasporic critical framework has held within studies of Caribbean writings since the early 1990s and the dramatic reversal of fortune for nation-based texts since the 1960s and the then dominant agendas of cultural and literary nationalism. The Black Atlantic model, most clearly articulated by Paul Gilroy’s 1993 landmark study The Black Atlantic, offered a powerful redress to the claims of nationalism but, to my mind, created an equally forceful critical sway, diverting attention away from increasingly marginal texts focused on the located and the local. Just as I have sought to challenge the normalisation of nationalist claims in the 1960s and 1970s, so too I wish to resist the theoretical orthodoxies of this later critical moment and their implied claims that interest in the nation is both outdated and regressive. My perception is that in the present moment what seems to receive less attention, certainly outside the Caribbean, are those writers who have stayed and whose works have embedded themselves in their island and region.
