ABSTRACT
When Trinidadian emigre writer Sam Selvon published Ways of Sunlight in 1957, his seventh year in London, the collection of nineteen short stories represented a new departure for the author. This chapter argues that Ways of Sunlight is of twofold interest for an investigation into the construction of coherence in the short story cycle. It introduces the concept of the "organizing principle" to elucidate the spatial organization of migrant short story cycles, which tend to shift from – or alternate between – stories set in Britain and stories set in various places in (or near) the author's respective country of origin. In a short commentary on Ways of Sunlight, Barbara Korte observes that "the volume's division into stories set in Trinidad and London respectively reflects the migrant's cultural "inbetweenness". This description is helpful but requires some qualification, since evocations of states of "inbetweenness" have long been a staple of postcolonial writing.
