Here is exciting news; this latest issue of the Journal of West Indian Literature (JWIL 34:2), edited by Cornel Bogle, celebrates the journal’s 40th anniversary. Read a brief description by the editors-in-chief below.
This issue of JWIL, edited by Cornel Bogle, marks the journal’s 40th year by reflecting on its history while showcasing the breadth and vitality of contemporary Caribbean literary criticism.
Opening with an introduction that asks how the history of the Journal of West Indian Literature might be told after four decades of publication, the issue brings together essays on Sam Selvon’s non-representational politics, C. L. R. James’s Minty Alley, Marlon James’s political postmodernism, Elizabeth Nunez’s Prospero’s Daughter, and Tony Delsham’s treatment of addiction and social crisis in Martinique. It also features a special contribution by Simona Bertacco and the late Velma Pollard on reading Creole in Anglophone Caribbean literature, an interview between Philip Nanton and Shalini Puri, and Curdella Forbes’s poem “Blind Date: Old Movie in Three Reels.”
The issue concludes with reviews of Alison Donnell’s Lost and Found: An A–Z of Neglected Writers of the Anglophone Caribbean; Letters in Exile: Transnational Journeys of a Harlem Renaissance Writer, a collection of Claude McKay’s letters edited by Brooks E. Hefner and Gary Edward Holcomb; Tao Leigh Goffe’s Dark Laboratory; Monique Roffey’s Passiontide; Canisia Lubrin’s Code Noir; and Oneka LaBennett’s Global Guyana.
Together, the contributions return to JWIL’s founding concerns around issues of language, form, history, regionalism, diaspora, and the politics of literary recognition, while asking what Caribbean literary scholarship must continue to make visible in the present.
As has been our practice for some time now, the introduction and book reviews are open access on our website: https://www.jwilonline.org/downloads/jwil-volume-34-number-2-april-2026/
Here is exciting news; this latest issue of the Journal of West Indian Literature (JWIL 34:2), edited by Cornel Bogle, celebrates the journal’s 40th anniversary. Read a brief description by the editors-in-chief below. This issue of JWIL, edited by Cornel Bogle, marks the journal’s 40th year by reflecting on its history while showcasing the breadth and vitality
