Caribbean Discourses

This edited collection represents a first-of-its-kind exploration of English-related discourses in the Caribbean. Drawing from Critical Discourse and stylistic analyses, the book's wide-ranging chapters examine language as it is produced within the complex demographic milieu of the region. It addresses a critical lack of linguistic scholarship on discourse types from the Caribbean, since the major academic focus in the post-independence era has been on descriptive and interventionist work in Creole Linguistics. This volume seeks to add new dimensions to language in practice with its focus on the development of discourse types within the region, public policy, discourses surrounding the galvanising figure of the Caribbean Prime Minister, literary discourses, and gender and media representations. As a site of great variation, linguistic and otherwise, the Caribbean provides unique insight into the interplay of the socio-political and language in contemporary societies in the Global South. Based on work presented at the University of Trinidad and Tobago’s “Stylistics, Critical Discourse Analysis and Language Use in the Caribbean” 2021 conference, the book draws together papers from established Caribbeanists seeking to bridge the existing theoretical and analytical gap between the more macro, socio-political aspects of studies in the social sciences, and the more micro features of linguistic analysis. With its breadth of coverage and analysis, this volume has implications for work being done at all levels of university scholarship in the social sciences, media discourses, decolonisation practices, and language and society in postcolonial and multi-ethnic contexts worldwide. Ryan Durgasingh is a Research Fellow at Ruhr University, Bochum, and PhD candidate at the University of Münster, Germany, where his work focuses on morphosyntactic variation in Caribbean Englishes. His research interests include stylistics, Critical Discourse Studies, variationist sociolinguistics, and corpus-based approaches to linguistic analysis. Nicha Selvon-Ramkissoon is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Education Programmes, University of Trinidad and Tobago. Her main areas of interest are in Language Arts Curriculum Development, Second Dialect/Language Pedagogy, Critical Discourse Studies, and Translanguaging pedagogy for migrant communities.