Martin Carter and Pan-Caribbean Literary Culture

The Guyanese poet Martin Carter (1927-1997) was one of the foremost Caribbean writers of the twentieth century. Twice imprisoned by the colonial government of British Guiana during the Emergency in the 1950s, he became a minister in Guyana's first independent government during the 60s, representing his country at the United Nations, but resigned in disillusionment after three years to live, in his words, 'simply as a poet, remaining with the people'. He was one of the first Caribbean poets to write about slavery, Amerindian history and Indian indentureship in relation to contemporary concerns. His work has been in print since the 1950s without interruption, and has been published in China, Cuba, Guyana, India, Trinidad, the Soviet Union, the UK and the US; UNESCO funded a Spanish translation in 1999. Critics working on Caribbean literature recognise the need to assess individual writers in context, and the addition of Carter to this literary history is overdue. This project will provide the first book-length study of Carter's work, provisionally entitled 'Poet of the Americas: Martin Carter and Pan-Caribbean Literary Culture'.

The monograph aims to provide a comprehensive assessment of Carter's contribution to pan-Caribbean twentieth-century poetics. Examining the full range of his work, it will assess the extent to which Carter's reputation as the Caribbean's 'protest poet' and Guyana's 'national poet' should define a literary history of his work. This will involve investigating how Carter's imaginative local and global concerns (eg. from his poetic working of an encounter on the streets of Georgetown ('The Poems Man') to his poems for distant comrades ('For Angela Davis')) should be understood in relation to pan-Caribbean twentieth-century poetics. It will involve examining the poetic relationships between Carter and his predecessors (including canonical writers in English, radicals, writers of nation, recent Caribbean pioneers), contemporaries (eg. Louise Bennett, Aimé Césaire, Nicolas Guillen, Wilson Harris, Derek Walcott) and successors (eg. Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Grace Nichols). In examining Carter's range, it will be necessary to explore how his political engagement and later philosophical readings together engender a poetic that questions and reformulates conceptions of freedom and social relationships. Carter's reading practices reveal a writer engaging with and challenging what Cassanova calls 'world literary space': Carter is aware that a 'local' Caribbean poetics can be part of textual communities (e.g. pan-Caribbean, pan-American) that stretch beyond national and political communities, but also that a writer's place within world literary space can be contested, limited or enhanced by local circumstances. The study of Carter will involve working closely within these ways of framing Caribbean literature and postcolonial criticism, moving beyond a mono-lingual focus and foregrounding the concepts of 'the pan-Caribbean' and 'the Americas'.

In addition, the monograph aims to explore how Carter's example can inform the growing field of 'the history of the book' within Postcolonial Studies: this involves attending to how the composition, production and reception of literature can help bring into focus debates within postcolonial studies concerning colonialism, political action and nationality. The first publications of many twentieth-century Caribbean poets were locally produced and self-financed. Although Carter was the first of his generation of poets to be published outside the Caribbean (Poems of Resistance (1954)), he was unusual in then publishing largely locally as his career progressed. In assessing Carter's place within pan-Caribbean poetics, I will examine the pivotal role of local Caribbean publishing in the literary history of the region, and how Carter's poetics engaged with the limitations and possibilities of the available publishing networks.