Poetics of Performance

A Poetics of Performance: The Oral-Scribal Aesthetics in Anglophone Caribbean Fiction explores the impact of orature-performance on Caribbean prose fiction. Arguing that orature-performance is the structuring device for many contemporary novels and short stories, this work extends the critical consensus that Caribbean oral modes infuse all genres of literature from the region. This book also examines how the formal and thematic synergies between Caribbean orature and literature constitute an inter-performative relationship between the region’s literary and performance cultures. Beginning with a retrospective analysis of New Day and The Lonely Londoners, two harbingers of an aesthetic of orality, A Poetics of Performance reads fictions by post-1950s writers Earl Lovelace, Merle Collins, Marie-Elena John, Marlon James and Collin Channer alongside calypso, reggae, and different modes of Caribbean oral storytelling. The analyses elucidate what may be termed the most consequential aspect of Caribbean literary self-fashioning: an “inward turn” to the expressive resources and discursive tools of folk and popular culture. This recuperation has in turn forged a literary tradition grounded, not only in the folk and urban working-class performance cultures, but inevitably in a “woman”-centered poetics.