Literary Histories of the Early Anglophone Caribbean

235 Pages·2018·5.735 MB·English

by  Nicole N. Aljoe, Brycchan Carey, Thomas W. Krise

NEW CARIBBEAN STUDIES
LITERARY HISTORIES OF
THE EARLY ANGLOPHONE
CARIBBEAN
Islands in the Stream
EDITED BY
NICOLE N. ALJOE,
BRYCCHAN CAREY,
THOMAS W. KRISE
New Caribbean Studies
Series Editors
Kofi Campbell
Department of English
Wilfrid Laurier University
Waterloo, ON, Canada
Shalini Puri
Department of English
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA, USA
New Caribbean Studies series seeks to contribute to Caribbean self-
understanding, to intervene in the terms of global engagement with the
region, and to extend Caribbean Studies’ role in reinventing various disci-
plines and their methodologies well beyond the Caribbean. The series
especially solicits humanities-informed and interdisciplinary scholarship
from across the region’s language traditions.
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14752
Nicole N. Aljoe • Brycchan Carey
Thomas W. Krise
Editors
Literary Histories of
the Early Anglophone
Caribbean
Islands in the Stream
Editors
Nicole N. Aljoe Brycchan Carey
Department of English Department of Humanities
Northeastern University Northumbria University
Boston, MA, USA New Castle-Upon-Tyne, UK
Thomas W. Krise
Pacific Lutheran University
Tacoma, WA, USA
New Caribbean Studies
ISBN 978-3-319-71591-9 ISBN 978-3-319-71592-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71592-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018935566
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C
ontents
1 Introduction 1
Nicole N. Aljoe, Brycchan Carey, and Thomas W. Krise
2 “Memory, Rememory, and the Moral Constitution
of Caribbean Literary History” 11
Keith Sandiford
3 Early Caribbean Evangelical Life Narrative 37
Sue Thomas
4 The Promise of the Tropics: Wealth, Illness, and African
Bodies in Early Anglo-Caribbean Medical Writing 61
Kelly Wisecup
5 Order, Disorder, and Reorder: The Paradox of Creole
Representations in Caribbeana (1741) 81
Jo Anne Harris
6 Testimonies of the Enslaved in the Caribbean Literary
History 107
Nicole N. Aljoe
v
vi CONTENTS
7 Beyond Bonny and Read: Blackbeard’s Bride and Other
Women in Caribbean Piracy Narratives 125
Richard Frohock
8 Early Creole Novels in English Before 1850: Hamel,
the Obeah Man and Warner Arundell: The Adventures
of a Creole 147
Candace Ward and Tim Watson
9 Colonial Vices and Metropolitan Corrections: Satire
and Slavery in the Early Caribbean 171
Brycchan Carey
10 Finding the Modern in Early Caribbean Literature 193
Cassander L. Smith
Index 213
n C
otes on ontributors
Nicole N. Aljoe is Associate Professor of English and African American
Studies at Northeastern University. She is co-director of The Early
Caribbean Digital Archive and editor of Caribbeana: The Journal of the
Early Caribbean Society. Author of Creole Testimonies: Slave Narratives
from the British West Indies, 1709–1836 (Palgrave 2012), she also co-edited
Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early Americas (UVA 2014).
Brycchan Carey is Professor of English at Northumbria University. He is
the author of British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing,
Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807 (Palgrave, 2005) and From Peace to
Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Antislavery,
1658–1761 (Yale University Press, 2012). His edition of Olaudah Equiano’s
Interesting Narrative was published by Oxford World’s Classics in 2018.
Richard Frohock is an associate professor in the Department of English
at Oklahoma State University, USA. He is the author of Buccaneers and
Privateers: The Story of the English Sea Rover, 1675–1725 and articles in The
Journal of Early American Literature and Eighteenth Century Studies. His
areas of interest and expertise include early American, early Caribbean and
eighteenth-century British literature.
Jo Anne Harris is an assistant professor at the Georgia Gwinnett College,
USA. Her teaching and research focus on cultural and digital representa-
tions of the Caribbean through development of online resources such as
The Virtual Caribbean Cybrary.
vii
viii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Thomas W. Krise is President Emeritus and Professor of English at
Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. A former president of
the Early Caribbean Society and the Society of Early Americanists, he is
the editor of Caribbeana: An Anthology of English Literature of the West
Indies, 1657–1777 (University of Chicago Press, 1999).
Keith Sandiford is a professor in the Department of English at Louisiana
State University, USA. His areas of interest include eighteenth-century
British literature and cultural studies and eighteenth-century Atlantic
intellectual history. He received his Bachelor’s degree from Inter‐American
University of Puerto Rico and a Master’s degree and PhD from the
University of Illinois, Urbana‐Champaign.
Cassander Smith is Assistant Professor of English in the Department of
English at the University of Alabama, USA, where she teaches undergrad-
uate and graduate courses in early African American, American and
Caribbean literatures. Both her teaching and research focus on representa-
tions of black Africans in early Atlantic literature, emphasizing the racial-
cultural ideologies that helped shape English encounters with the early
Americas and helped shape the literature produced about those encoun-
ters. Her work has appeared in several edited collections and journals
including Early American Literature and Studies in Travel Writing. She is
the author of Black Africans in the British Imagination: English Narratives
of the Atlantic World (2016).
Sue Thomas is an associate professor in the Department of English at La
Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of Telling West
Indian Lives. Her recent research ranges across decolonizing literatures,
nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing and histories of representation
of racial difference, including “whiteness” as a historical racial category. In
the field of decolonizing literatures, her special areas of interest are
Caribbean writing, the transculturation of modernism, and transcultural
and transhistorical textual traffic. Her scholarship is highly attentive to
historical and cultural contexts, and histories of genre and representation.
She is a member of the editorial board of Postcolonial Studies and of the
National Advisory Board of the Australian Modernist Studies Network.
Candace Ward is an associate professor in the Department of English at
the Florida State University, USA. She specializes in eighteenth-century
British literature, early Anglo-Caribbean literature and culture, and early
women’s fiction. She has also worked on the editorial staff of College
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTOR S ix
English (1990–1992) and South Atlantic Review (1992–1993) and at
Dover Publications (1993–1996). In 2002–2003, she was awarded a
Fulbright Fellowship to the University of the West Indies, Jamaica, and an
American Association of University Women postdoctoral fellowship. Her
book, Desire and Disorder: Fever, Fictions, and Feeling in English Georgian
Culture (2007), explores one of the eighteenth century’s most persistent
tropes, the fevered body. She is the co-editor with Tim Watson of the
Broadview edition of the 1827 novel Hamel, the Obeah Man.
Tim Watson is an associate professor in the Department of English at the
University of Miami, USA. He is the author of Caribbean Culture and
British Fiction in the Atlantic World, 1780–1870 and the co-editor with
Candace Ward of the Broadview edition of the 1827 novel Hamel, the
Obeah Man.
Kelly Wisecup is Assistant Professor of English at the Northwestern
University, USA, and the author of Medical Encounters: Knowledge and
Identity in Early American Literatures (2013). With Toni Wall Jaudon,
she edited a special issue on obeah for Atlantic Studies (2015).