The Amerindian Presence in a Selection of Children’s Literature from Jamaica, Dominica, Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago in the Anglophone Caribbean

Cynthia James
 

ABSTRACT

Despite revivalist interest in Amerindian cultures, the representation of Amerindians in Caribbean literature has not been given much attention. This paper examines representations of the Amerindian and Amerindian culture in ten texts from the small but growing field of Anglophone Caribbean literature, written for or used with children and young adults, in five genres – drama, fiction, non-fiction, myth, and folktale. The texts date from the1966 to 2002 and were written by authors from four former British colonies - Jamaica in the north, Guyana and Trinidad in the south, and Dominica in the central and leeward Caribbean. In the majority of cases, Amerindians are not the authors of this body of children’s literature, but in some cases the literature was written by descendants of mixed ethnicity. The analysis reveals that the depiction of the Amerindian in texts emanating from the island-Caribbean is different from that in texts emanating from Guyana. This study of textual representations of Amerindian culture adds to research on cross-cultural children’s literature studies in the Anglophone Caribbean. It also adds to an understanding of the development of Anglophone children’s literature since its beginning in the post-Independence era of the 1960s.