Created in the West Indies

Created in the West Indies: Caribbean Perspectives on V.S. Naipaul updates and furthers the debates on the life and work of an internationally acclaimed writer, Nobel laureate and native son of Trinidad and Tobago. The book draws together the proceedings of a series of outstanding public lectures and an academic symposium that featured a distinguished cadre of Caribbean scholars who, during 2007, participated in a year-long schedule of activities initiated by the University of the West Indies, St Augustine campus, to honour the life and work of this highly accomplished `enigma’ of Caribbean letters. The essays in this collection are organised into three sections that represent a compression of the multifaceted range of V.S. Naipaul’s creative concerns, thematic explorations, even obsessions, and philosophical persuasions. The singular power of these contributions is their ability to push at the borders of Naipaul scholarship, cutting new pathways for considering this most intriguing creative mind and offering fresh perspectives on the now familiar themes of postcolonial identity and nationalism, the fiction of history and history of fiction, home and belonging in a world characterised by flux, movement and cultural contact. Controversy has always companioned Naipaul’s career. Not surprisingly, some of the contributions are unrelentingly honest in their exposé of Naipaul for his trademark impatience with the very societies that created his unique sensibility and his propensity for self-contradiction.