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This book is a history of Creole, or 'dialect', literature and performance in the English-speaking Caribbean. It revises the common view that literary dialect in the Caribbean was a relatively modern twentieth-century phenomenon, and explores both the lives and the literary texts of a number of early progenitors.
List of contents
- Introduction: Speaking Badly (In Prose)
- 1: White Creoles, 'Bad' Grammar, and the Birth of Dialect Literature
- 2: Violent Ventriloquism: The Golden Age
- 3: The Charles Dickens of Jamaica
- 4: Travelling Dialect
- 5: Home to Harlem
- Epilogue: Global Creole
Summary
Creole Noise is a history of Creole, or 'dialect', literature and performance in the English-speaking Caribbean, from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. By emphasizing multiracial origins, transnational influences, and musical performance alongside often violent historical events of the nineteenth century - slavery, Emancipation, the Morant Bay Rebellion, the era of blackface minstrelsy, indentureship and immigration - it revises the common view that literary dialect in the Caribbean was a relatively modern, twentieth-century phenomenon, associated with regional anti-colonial or black-affirming nationalist projects. It explores both the lives and the literary texts of a number of early progenitors, among these a number of pro-slavery white creoles as well as the first black author of literary dialect in the English-speaking Caribbean. Creole Noise features a number of fascinating historical characters, among these Henry Garland Murray, a black Jamaican journalist and lecturer; Michael McTurk, the white magistrate from British Guiana who, as 'Quow', authored one of the earliest books of dialect literature; as well as blackface comedian and calypsonian Sam Manning, who along with Marcus Garvey's ex-wife, Amy Ashwood Garvey, wrote a popular dialect play that traveled across the United States. In so doing it reconstructs an earlier period of dialect literature, usually isolated or dismissed from the cultural narrative as racist mimicry or merely political, not part of a continuum of artistic production in the Caribbean
Additional text
'Belinda Edmondson's brilliant study reminds us of the extent to which writing and reading have been made the proof of love, nationalism, belonging, authentic identity, even as...orality has been celebrated as the authentic discourse of the region first-rate cultural history, original both in its use of the archives, and in its interpretive insights.' - Small Axe 72
