June E. Roberts is Assistant Professor of English and African, African-American and Caribbean Studies.

Jamaican novelist, anthropologist, historian, and sociologist Erna Brodber became a prominent West Indian writer during the second half of the 20th century. Her Afro-centric works emphasize the importance of ancestral spirituality and aesthetics, connecting to a vital cultural past. This first full-length study of Brodber includes several chapters of pertinent background material, then detailed analyses of three of Brodner's novels: Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, Myal, and Louisiana. Discussing such elements as allegory, irony, feminism, and syncretism, Roberts places Brodber within the context of the wider Caribbean and the Americas through comparisons with other writers, notably Zora Neale Hurston, Marcus Garvey, and W. E. B. Du Bois….Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

• PrefaceOrigins of a Tradition: The Continuum of Caribbean LiteratureThe Informing Intellectual ClimateInterdisciplinary and Intercultural Social ConstructionsBodber's Discursive Position Within and Without Caribbean Literary Traditions and TropesWomen Writers and Feminism: A Canon of Their Own Tropes and ConcernsReading the Text: The Sometimes Ambiguous Kumbla of the folk in Jane and LouisaGetting Out of the Physical Kumbla and Getting Back to the Spiritual Kumbla: Historisizing Textual TemporalityReading Myal and Thwarting Spirit ThieveryThe Location of Spirit ThieveryRedemption Allegories and MyalismTropes of the Harlem Renaissance-Minstrelsy and Early 20th Century Black RepresentationAfrican Spirituality: The Ultimate ConnectionIntimations of Allegories of UnificationEpilogueNotes