ABSTRACT
Critical discourse has by and large made distinct separations between migrant literature of the Anglophone Caribbean published before 1970, and the literature published towards the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-fi rst. These separations have been along several parameters: the earlier work identifi ed as male-authored, imbricated in the poetics of exile, conservative with regard to contemporary “hot” issues such as sex and sexuality (including alternative sexualities); the later publications identifi ed as predominantly female-authored, celebrating diaspora, open, direct and iconoclastic on subjects traditionally seen as taboo. Typically too, the migrant writers of the pre-1970s generation are read as representatives of a colonial generation journeying to the motherland, as opposed to their female successors who are identifi ed with the North American metropoles and an implicitly more “post/modern” sensibility and orientation. Edmondson (Making Men) posits a separation based on the idea that the male writers saw themselves as an exilic elite in the tradition of the Victorian gentleman dissociated from labor, whereas the female writers domiciled in the US are more closely identifi ed with an immigrant labor force-implicitly, by extension, a more “democratized” writerly positioning.
