Michael Niblett – författare

The Caribbean Novel Since 1945 offers a comparative analysis of fiction from across the pan-Caribbean, exploring the relationship between literary form, cultural practice, and the nation-state. Engaging with the historical and political impact of capitalist imperialism, decolonization, class struggle, ethnic conflict, and gender relations, it considers the ways in which Caribbean authors have sought to rethink and re-narrate the traumatic past and often problematic ''postcolonial'' present of the region''s peoples. It pays particular attention to the role cultural practices such as stickfighting and Carnival, as well as religious rituals and beliefs like Vodou and Myal, have played in efforts to reshape the novel form. In so doing, it provides an original perspective on the importance of these practices, with their emphasis on bodily movement, to the development of new philosophies of history.

Beginning in the post-WWII period, when optimism surrounding the possibility of social and political change was at a peak, The Caribbean Novel Since 1945 interrogates the trajectories of various national projects through to the present. It explores how the textual histories of common motifs in Caribbean writing have functioned to encode the fluctuating fortunes of different political dispensations. The scope of the analysis is varied and comprehensive, covering both critically acclaimed and lesser-known authors from the Anglophone, Francophone, and Hispanophone traditions. These include Jacques Roumain, Sam Selvon, Marie Chauvet, Luis Rafael Sánchez, Earl Lovelace, Patrick Chamoiseau, Erna Brodber, Wilson Harris, Shani Mootoo, Oonya Kempadoo, Ernest Moutoussamy, and Pedro Juan Gutiérrez. Mixing detailed analysis of key texts with wider surveys of significant trends, this book emphasizes the continuing significance of representations of the nation-state to literary articulations of resistance to the imperialist logic of global capital.

Located at the intersection of world-literary studies and the environmental humanities, this book analyses how fiction and poetry respond to the ecological transformations entailed by commodity frontiers. Examining the sugar, cacao, coal, and oil frontiers in Trinidad, Brazil, and Britain, World Literature and Ecology shows how literary texts have registered the relationship between the re-making of biophysical natures and struggles around class, race, and gender. It combines a materialist theory of world-literature with the insights of the world-ecology perspective to generate compelling new readings of writers such as Rhys Davies, Yseult Bridges, Lewis Jones, José Lins do Rego, Ellen Wilkinson, Jorge Amado, Gwyn Thomas, and Ralph de Boissière. The book represents a timely intervention into a series of field-defining debates around peripheral realisms and modernisms, ecocriticism, and the energy humanities.

Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology, and the Global Food System marks a significant intervention into the field of literary food studies. Drawing on new work in world literature, cultural studies, and environmental studies, the essays gathered here explore how literary and cultural texts have represented and responded to the global food system from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Covering topics such as the impact of colonial monocultures and industrial agriculture, enclosure and the loss of the commons, the meatification of diets, the toxification of landscapes, and the consequences of climate breakdown, the volume ranges across the globe, from Thailand to Brazil, Cyprus to the Caribbean. Whether it is anxieties over imported meat in late Victorian Britain, labour struggles on Guatemalan banana plantations, or food dependency in Puerto Rico, the contributors to this volume show how fiction, poetry, drama, film, and music have critically explored and contributed to food cultures worldwide.