In Sweet Li Jie, two distant worlds converge: Wuhan Province in China and British Guiana.Jia Yun, a traveling textile merchant, leaves Wuhan to join the exodus of migrants escaping poverty. Most of them to become indentured labourers in the canefields of Demerara.Through heartfelt letters intended for his sweetheart, Li Jie, Jia Yun paints a vivid picture of life for Indians, Africans, and other ethnic groups under British rule during the twilight years of indentur...

Winner of the 2014 Guyana Prize for Fiction, Johnson's Dictionary is set variously in 18th century London and Demerara in British Guiana. It is a celebration of the skills of the enslaved as organisers, story-tellers, artists and mathematicians, hidden in the main from their white masters and mistresses, that is resonant with an undying human urge for freedom.Galley, gallery, gallimaufry: In a novel set in 18th century London and Demerara (in British Guiana), that might be...

Slavery is a recurring subject in works by the contemporary black writers in Britain Caryl Phillips, David Dabydeen and Fred D’Aguiar, yet their return to this past arises from an urgent need to understand the racial anxieties of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Britain. This book examines the ways in which their literary explorations of slavery may shed light on current issues in Britain today, or what might be thought of as the continuing legacies of the UK’s largely forgotten slave p...

This book has been divided into two sections, each of which contains articles whose focus is predominantly on one aspect of Dabydeen's writing - his poetry or his novels.

In the context of a diversified and pluralistic arena of contemporary literature embodying previously marginalized voices of region, ethnicity, gender, and class, black poets living in Britain developed a distinct branch of contemporary poetry. Having emerged from a struggle to give voice to marginalized groups in Britain, the poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson, David Dabydeen, and Fred D’Aguiar helped define national identity and explored racial oppression. Motivated by a sense of responsibil...

This is Dabydeen's academic works which comprises a series of interviews. In it he tackles the controversial aspects of race, ethnicity and "belonging".

It is now almost forty years since David Dabydeen published his first creative work - a collection of poetry entitled Slave Song (1984) - which won both the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and the Quiller-Couch Prize. Since then there have been two further collections of poetry: Coolie Odyssey (1988) and the long narrative poem Turner (1994), as well as seven novels. Dabydeen's first novel, The Intended, was published in 1991, followed by Disappearance (1993), The Counting House (1996), A Harlot...

Since the poem was first published in 1994, it has been subject to a significant level of critical debate and discussion which continues to the present day. The aim of this book is to bring together a selection of the many articles that have engaged with the poem, and to show how they explore its relationship to the events depicted in the painting. Edited with an Introduction by Lynne Macedo, The Hook of Desire contains eleven articles - three of which were specially commissioned for this ...

In Volume One of his memoirs, Dr Yesu Persaud wrote movingly about his family and their struggles both during and after the abolition of the indentureship system that had first brought them to what was then British Guiana. In Volume Two, he continues the story of his life from the mid-1970s, and provides a fascinating view of his business and professional life, as well as his philanthropy. Entwined with this story is a more personal account which gives a deeper insight into Dr Persaud's pr...

'This illuminating, vivid volume is a fitting tribute to the experiences of migration' - Hanif KureishiBetween the arrival of the HMT Empire Windrush in 1948 and the passing of the 1971 Immigration Act, half a million people came to the UK from the Caribbean. In the aftermath of the 2018 Windrush Scandal, the story of the Windrush Generation is more widely known than ever. But is it the whole story?Through a series of biographical essays, poems and articles, The Other W...

The abolition of slavery was the catalyst for the arrival of the first Indian indentured labourers into the sugar colonies of Mauritius (1834), Guyana (1838) and Trinidad (1845), followed some years later by the inception of the system in South Africa (1860) and Fiji (1879). By the time indenture was abolished in the British Empire (1917–20), over one million Indians had been contracted, the overwhelming majority of whom never returned to India. Today, an Indian indentured labour diaspora ...

Most writers associated with the first generation of British Romanticism - Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, Thelwall, and others - wrote against the slave trade. This edition collects a corpus of work which reflects the issues and theories concerning slavery and the status of the slave.