Writing of and for a Revolution

While the cultural memory of revolutionary movements has remained consistently significant within Caribbean literary traditions, the imaginative shaping of what constitutes revolutionary ideals and subjects has undergone meaningful transition across the decades of the late twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Literary works have continued to engage meaningfully with the Haitian Revolution of 1791, the Cuban Revolution of 1953, the Grenadian Revolution of 1979, the Rodney Riots in Jamaica in 1968, the Black Power Revolution of 1970 in Trinidad and the late 1970s cultural – and attempted political – revolution in Guyana. This essay traces three characteristic features of a range of literary works: first, a sensibility tuned to the excess of the possible over the actual; second, a commitment to narrating the punctuations of revolutionary time; and third, a move towards testimonial forms that foreground the direct voicing of previously peripheral and silenced subjects.