Bridging the Black Atlantic: Caribbean Poetics from Calypso to the British Canon

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Published: Jun 30, 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.47743/lincu-2025-1-0408
Keywords:
Caribbean poetry British poetry postcolonial studies transnational studies innovation

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Monica Manolachi
University of Bucharest

Abstract

After the arrival of the Empire Windrush generation in the 1950s and the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, the post-war decades have seen an increase in the number of Caribbean poets publishing their work in the UK. Their poetry began to be recognised as significant literary products of the postcolonial situation, in parallel with the emergence of British cultural studies as a research field, with prominent theorists like Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy. Referring to the literary relationship between home and diaspora, Sarah Lawson Welsh (2020) highlighted the shifting and transitional character of Caribbean writing in its connection with Britain, an aspect which in turn has influenced poets’ ars poetica substantially. Many Caribbean poets related to Britain by birth, residence or travel have searched for innovative ways of making sense of their diasporic experiences and of creating new subjectivities by delving into the transatlantic nature of a composite identity par excellence. The aim of this paper is to show that Caribbean poetry linked to Britain has simultaneously aesthetic and multicultural value. Based on individual and group poetry collections, it maps several poetic novelties brought about by the postcolonial social transformation and argues for a number of reasons why these were employed.

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How to Cite
Manolachi, M. “Bridging the Black Atlantic: Caribbean Poetics from Calypso to the British Canon”. Linguaculture, vol. 16, no. 1, June 2025, pp. 45-67, doi:10.47743/lincu-2025-1-0408.
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Vol. 16 No. 1 (2025): East≠West: Revisiting Travel and Cultural Mobility
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Articles
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Author Biography

Monica Manolachi, University of Bucharest

Monica MANOLACHI is a lecturer of English and Spanish at the University of Bucharest, an award-winning translator and a bilingual poet. Performative Identities in Contemporary Caribbean British Poetry (Ars Docendi, 2017) is part of her work as a researcher and literary critic. Three of her recent published articles are ”Literary Translation as a Form of Social and Pedagogical Activism“, “Rainbow Rhythms in Contemporary Caribbean Poetry” and “Multiethnic Resonances in Derek Walcott’s Poetry”. She has translated several poetry collections into Romanian, including selected poems by Caribbean poets, contemporary Scottish poets, Eavan Boland, Peter Thabit Jones, and Over Land, Over Sea, an anthology of migration poetry. Her work is available in anthologies like Immigrant Voices in the Pandemic (Solis Press, 2023) and Poetry and Settled Status for All (CivicLeicester, 2022). Her newest poetry collection is Journeys in Europe / Călătorii în Europa (Bifrost, 2022), written and translated with poet Neil Leadbeater.

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