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This book investigates the problematical historical location of the term ‘religion’ and examines how this location has affected the analytical reading of postcolonial fiction and poetry. The adoption of the term ‘religion’ outside of a Western Enlightenment and Christian context should therefore be treated with caution. Within postcolonial literary criticism, there has been either a silencing of the category as a result of this caution or an uncritical and essentializing adoption of the term ‘religion’. It is argued in the present study that a vital aspect of how writers articulate their histories of colonial contact, migration, slavery, and the re-forging of identities in the wake of these histories is illuminated by the classificatory term ‘religion’. Aspects of postcolonial theory and Religious Studies theory are combined to provide fresh insights into the literature, thereby expanding the field of postcolonial literary criticism. The way in which writers ‘remember’ history through writing is central to the way in which ‘religion’ is theorized and articulated; the act of remembrance can be persuasively interpreted in terms of ‘religion’. The title ‘Memory and Myth’ therefore refers to both the syncretic mythology of Guyana, and the key themes in a new critical understanding of ‘religion’. Particular attention is devoted to Wilson Harris’s novel Jonestown , alongside theoretical and historical material on the actual Jonestown tragedy; to the mesmerizing effect of the Anancy tales on contemporary writers, particularly the poet John Agard; and to the work of the Indo-Guyanese writer David Dabydeen and his elusive character Manu.

Guyanese literature --- Religion in literature. --- Guyanese literature. --- Religion in drama --- Religion in poetry --- English literature --- History and criticism. --- Guyanese authors

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Fiction in English --- Guyanese writers --- Texts --- Guyana --- Fiction.

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The idea of India and the Indian diasporic imagination is the product of the rich scholarship being done on the Asian sub-continent, as well as in the many countries where South Asians have settled. The notion of ‘many Indias’ and many diasporas attempts to accommodate people with multiple identities, encompassing a complex amalgam that includes the bewildering diversity of the sub-continent and the challenging hybridity of the places where they have settled. The shaping and reshaping of identities are fundamental to the universal quest to belong and to create new homelands while not eliminating notions of the imagined ancestral homelands. The reality is, as this volume demonstrates, that old conceptions of India, even ‘many Indias’, are now inadequate to accommodate the fluid identities that characterize the Asian sub-continental diasporas. L’idée de l’Inde et de l’imagination diasporique est le résultat des nombreux travaux de recherche réalisés dans le sous-continent indien ainsi que dans les divers pays où s’est installée la diaspora de l’Asie du Sud. Le concept d’une Inde multiple et diasporique tente d’intégrer un peuple aux identités plurielles, amalgame complexe d’un sous-continent indien à la diversité saisissante et de tous les pays d’accueil de cette diaspora hybride. La constitution inlassable des identités fonde cette quête universelle - comment créer de nouvelles attaches, un nouveau chez soi, sans renier ni oublier la patrie remémorée telle qu’elle demeure dans l’imaginaire ? Ce volume démontre que les conceptions anciennes, même celles qui reposent sur une Inde multiple, ne parviennent plus à intégrer les identités fluides qui caractérisent les diasporas de l’Asie du Sud.

Literature --- hybridité --- Caraïbe --- trauma --- Diaspora indienne --- Indo-Guyanais --- Indo-Caribéen --- amnésie --- océan indien --- hybridity --- Caribbean --- amnesia --- Indian Diaspora --- Indo-Guyanese --- Indo-Caribbean --- Indian Ocean

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This book explores the religious, educational, and social practice of a Muslim congregation and the moral world it generated within a mosque in UK. The life of the mosque is described through religious practice, communal activities and informal encounters and the history and ideas that shaped the moral world and thinking of the Indo-Guyanese who built it. Marked by a double diaspora experience with its implication of loss and re-imagining, the congregation's conception of living a Muslim life is embodied in both ritual and in styles of comportment and socializing while religious concerns are voiced in sermons, in religious classes and in responses to everyday situations. Links are made between anthropology and developmental and psychoanalytic understandings of embodied experience and the emergence of ethical capacity. This account contributes to the literature on Muslim communities in Europe and 'ordinary ethics.' As such, the book will be of interest to sociologists and anthropologists, to those involved in religious and psycho-social studies, and to clinicians working with Muslim communities.

Muslims --- Guyanese --- Mosques --- Mosques as community centers --- Communities --- Religious life --- Religious life --- Religious aspects --- Islam --- London (England) --- Religious life and customs

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Eric Walrond (1898-1966) was a writer, journalist, caustic critic, and fixture of 1920s Harlem. His short story collection, Tropic Death, was one of the first efforts by a black author to depict Caribbean lives and voices in American fiction. Restoring Walrond to his proper place as a luminary of the Harlem Renaissance, this biography situates Tropic Death within the author's broader corpus and positions the work as a catalyst and driving force behind the New Negro literary movement in America.James Davis follows Walrond from the West Indies to Panama, New York, France, and finally England. He recounts his relationships with New Negro authors such as Countée Cullen, Charles S. Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, and Gwendolyn Bennett, as well as the white novelist Carl Van Vechten. He also recovers Walrond's involvement with Marcus Garvey's journal Negro World and the National Urban League journal Opportunity and examines the writer's work for mainstream venues, including Vanity Fair. In 1929, Walrond severed ties with Harlem, but he did not disappear. He contributed to the burgeoning anticolonial movement and print culture centered in England and fueled by C. L. R. James, George Padmore, and other Caribbean expatriates. His history of Panama, shelved by his publisher during the Great Depression, was the first to be written by a West Indian author. Unearthing documents in England, Panama, and the United States, and incorporating interviews, criticism of Walrond's fiction and journalism, and a sophisticated account of transnational black cultural formations, Davis builds an eloquent and absorbing narrative of an overlooked figure and his creation of modern American and world literature.

American literature --- Harlem Renaissance. --- New Negro Movement --- Renaissance, Harlem --- African American arts --- English literature --- Agrarians (Group of writers) --- Caribbean American authors --- African American authors --- Walrond, Eric, --- Authors, American --- Guyanese Americans --- Walrond, Eric --- Biography