University of the West Indies Press Postcolonialisms: Caribbean Rereading of Medieval English Discourse

Caribbean revisioning of British literature is well established in creative work where it expresses itself in rewriting and writing back. In addition, Caribbean literary criticism has included an occasional rereading of imperial text (like Shakespeare's "Tempest") that seems immediately applicable to Caribbean culture. Part of mature Caribbean discourse must be a wider application of the Caribbean experience to demystifying an imperilled tradition.British literature, from the medieval to the postmodern, has been the training ground of Caribbean authors, poets and critics, and continues to be taught at secondary and tertiary levels throughout the region and in a wide range of countries that share the region's history of colonialism. Little has been done, however, to integrate Caribbean approaches to the canon."Postcolonialisms" interrogates the place of early English verse in relation to the British canon, proposing that the first postcolonial literature in English was English itself, a vernacular literature developing from a series of contact situations and evolving as a mechanism of resistance. The enquiry integrates several approaches to textual study, drawing together on the one hand, postcolonial and Caribbean criticism and, on the other, methods of historical and contact linguistics, and applying these within a framework of thought consistent with New Medievalism.The text is framed to discuss that the society that produced Middle English literature was built on a past of contact, conquest and dispossession, with lyrics reflecting a worldview in which individual human stature shrinks and insecurity intensifies. Major texts reread include the "Canterbury Tales", "Piers Plowman" and "The Pardoner's Prologue".