Caribbean

Epic poem reimagining Homer's Iliad and Odyssey through Caribbean fishermen on Saint Lucia.

Play about Makak, a charcoal burner who dreams of becoming an African king, exploring colonialism and identity.

Autobiographical poem about growing up in Saint Lucia, his artistic awakening, and Caribbean history.

Comprehensive collection of Walcott's poetry spanning four decades of Caribbean and world literature.

Coming-of-age novel following G. in colonial Barbados, exploring the end of colonial rule.

West Indians on a ship to England, exploring the immigrant experience and post-colonial identity.

Essays on Caribbean identity, colonialism, and the Prospero-Caliban relationship in Shakespeare's Tempest.

Coming-of-age story of Annie John in Antigua, from childhood bond with her mother to adolescent rebellion.

Young woman from Antigua works as au pair in American city, confronting colonialism and independence.

Searing essay critiquing colonialism's legacy, tourism, and corruption in post-independence Antigua.

Xuela, a woman in Dominica, narrates her life of resistance and solitude after her mother dies in childbirth.

Essays developing theory of Antillanité (Caribbeanness) and exploring Caribbean identity beyond Negritude.

Philosophical work developing 'Relation' as framework for understanding creolization and global identity.

Trilogy of poetry (Rights of Passage, Masks, Islands) tracing African diaspora experience across Middle Passage.

Essay on 'nation language' arguing for Caribbean English as legitimate literary language rooted in African rhythms.

Prequel to Jane Eyre telling the story of the 'madwoman in the attic' as Antoinette Cosway in Jamaica.

Padmore's analysis of Pan-Africanism as alternative to Communism for African liberation.

Exposé of British colonial exploitation across Africa.

Official record of the 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress that launched African independence movements.

Groundbreaking thesis that British industrial capitalism was funded by profits from the slave trade.

Analysis of Black life and labor in the Caribbean under colonial rule.

Comprehensive history of the Caribbean from colonization to modern independence movements.

Critique of how British historians distorted Caribbean history to justify colonialism.

Memoir combining cricket, colonial politics, and Caribbean identity; 'What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?'

Study of Melville's Moby Dick as allegory for American totalitarianism, written while James was detained on Ellis Island.

James's engagement with Hegel's dialectics and their application to revolutionary politics.

Novel giving voice to Tituba, the enslaved woman accused of witchcraft in Salem, exploring slavery and Black womanhood.

Epic novel following a Bambara family in 18th-19th century Mali through Islam's spread and slave trade.

Novel about a Jamaican religious community and its charismatic leader, exploring colonialism and resistance.

Essay interrogating how Western humanism excluded colonized peoples from the category of 'human'.

Collection of Hall's foundational essays on culture, class, representation, and politics.

Essays on race, identity, diaspora, and representation including 'Cultural Identity and Diaspora'.

Essay arguing audiences actively decode media messages rather than passively receiving them.

Analysis of Algerian revolution's social transformations including role of women and radio.

Posthumous collection of political essays on Algeria, Africa, and decolonization.

Long surrealist poem about returning to Martinique, coining 'négritude' and celebrating Black identity.

Poetic essay arguing colonialism dehumanizes both colonizer and colonized, comparing it to Nazism.

Adaptation of Shakespeare's Tempest from Caliban's perspective as colonized subject.

A crew push a boat up a Guyanese river in search of a legendary Amerindian settlement, mirroring and reversing the journey of conquest. The crew are simultaneously historical and spiritual doubles, alive and dead, explorer and explored.

A multigenerational story of three Grenadian women spanning the colonial era, independence, and the 1979 Grenadian Revolution. Collins, who participated in the revolution herself, writes with insider political passion and communal voice.

Sophie Caco, raised in Haiti, joins her mother in New York at twelve. The novel explores trauma, the body, Haitian traditions of female testing, and the possibilities of healing across generations and between two worlds.

A memoir about Danticat's father and uncle, two brothers separated by migration, and their parallel deaths in 2004, one from illness, the other in US immigration detention after Hurricane Ivan. A profound meditation on family and American policy toward Haiti.

Whitechapel, the oldest slave on a Virginia plantation, inadvertently causes his own son's death and must live with that knowledge. Told in multiple voices, a spare, devastating exploration of slavery's moral corruption.

A Guyanese engineer working on a sea-wall project in an English village becomes obsessed with his landlady's past, uncovering layers of colonial history and longing, a meditative novel about memory, belonging, and empire's weight on daily life.

An educated Guyanese engineer, unable to find work due to racism in postwar Britain, becomes a teacher in London's East End, a memoir of navigating race, class, and the possibilities of connection across the color line.

Mireille, a Haitian-American lawyer, is kidnapped outside her wealthy father's gate and held for ransom. The novel moves between captivity and aftermath, exploring trauma, class inequality in Haiti, and the long work of survival.

Manuel returns to Haiti after years in Cuba and attempts to bring water — and reconciliation — to his drought-stricken village divided by a blood feud. A lyrical socialist novel rooted in Vodou and peasant life.

Based on the 1937 Parsley Massacre when Trujillo's forces killed tens of thousands of Haitian sugar cane workers in the Dominican Republic. Amabelle survives and must find a way to live.

Four generations of women in Guadeloupe, from slavery to the mid-20th century, told through the voice of Télumée. A lyrical, feminist celebration of Black women's resilience rooted in Creole culture.

Narrated by the elderly Marie-Sophie Laborieux, the novel spans the history of Martinique from slavery through the shantytown of Texaco on the outskirts of Fort-de-France. A polyphonic explosion of Creole language.

Poetry collection that earned Goodison the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. Grounded in Caribbean landscape, female experience, and Jamaican vernacular, these poems celebrate womanhood across generations.

Set in a Trinidadian yard in the years before and after independence, the novel follows the people of Calvary Hill as they celebrate Carnival — Aldrick the Dragon Man, Fisheye, Sylvia — and the limits of rebellion.

The story of Caribbean migrants to post-war London — Moses, Galahad, Cap, Big City — navigating racism, poverty, and loneliness. Written in a lyrical Trinidad dialect, it invented a new prose voice.

Set in San Cristobal, a fictional Caribbean island at independence. Fola, a middle-class woman, attends a Vodun ceremony and is transformed, setting off events that culminate in revolution.

First volume of The Arrivants trilogy, tracing the Atlantic journey of enslaved Africans and their descendants through jazz, blues, and Caribbean rhythms. Brathwaite invented the concept of 'nation language.'

Second volume of The Arrivants trilogy, set in Africa — following the poet's search for roots in Ghana. Draws on Akan ritual, drum rhythms, and oral tradition.

Third and final volume of The Arrivants trilogy, returning to the Caribbean to interrogate what remains after the Middle Passage, slavery, and colonialism — and what can be built.

Tan-Tan escapes her abusive father to a parallel world, where she becomes the mythic outlaw figure the Midnight Robber, drawn from Caribbean Carnival tradition. Written in Afro-Caribbean creole.

In a Haitian village in 1938, a French woman is turned into a zombie on her wedding day and escapes through magic. A delirious mix of Vodou, eroticism, and Carnival set in the backdrop of American occupation.

The complete poems of Aimé Césaire, including Notebook of a Return to the Native Land and the later lyrics. Césaire co-founded Negritude and served as mayor of Fort-de-France for 56 years.

Fat Charlie Nancy discovers his father was Anansi, the West African spider-trickster god. His long-lost brother arrives with godlike abilities and turns his life upside down. A joyful exploration of West African mythology.

Bita Plant, a Jamaican girl educated in England by missionary patrons, returns to Jamaica and must choose between the Western values she was trained in and her own people. McKay's finest novel.

Padmore's major work arguing that Pan-Africanism — not Communism — is the correct path to African liberation. He broke with the Comintern in 1934 and became Nkrumah's advisor on Pan-Africanism.

Emily, an English woman visiting her father's Caribbean plantation in the early 19th century, and Cambridge, an enslaved African man who converted to Christianity, each narrate their experience of the same place.