Beyond the Kumbla: Sylvia Wynter and New Conversations

Beyond the Kumbla: Sylvia Wynter and New Conversations attests to the fact that the literary field dedicated to the study of Caribbean women’s writing, inaugurated by Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature (1990), flourishes and lives up to the excitement of its promise. Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory have now co-edited a sequel volume, including a community of voices representing the field’s vibrant growth since 1990.

Published here for the first time is the full extended essay Sylvia Wynter sent for the first book, necessarily limited then to a shortened Afterword. This now fully available long essay also links the past and present, for Wynter’s theoretical and creative vision speaks to our current realities.

“If Out of the Kumbla created a field of literary criticism even as it identified a nascent canon of writing by Caribbean women, Beyond the Kumbla is a testament to the fact of that critical nexus and the formidable body of writing from Caribbean women that now exists. An essential read for scholars and writers alike.”
— Pamela Mordecai, author of A Fierce Green Place: New and Selected Pomes

“Thirty years after the publication of the landmark collection Out of the Kumbla, Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory offer readers Beyond the Kumbla: Sylvia Wynter and New Conversations. The collection returns with the same depth, range, fresh insights, and eloquent contributors. Distinguished by its inclusiveness and a timely scholarly celebration of Wynter’s influential intellectual contributions, Beyond the Kumbla continues the remarkable legacy of its forerunner, Out of the Kumbla.”
— Carol Bailey, Professor, Black Studies Department, Amherst College

“Twice as nice. The first rendition of Out of the Kumbla arrived even before we could read it as a ground-breaking Caribbean feminist anthology. Now in its second rendition it adds to what was already many beautifully gathered voices other voices it helped to make possible after that first startling appearance. In the pages of this book are two generations of Caribbean feminist intellectuals whose deft analyses and insights rewrite womanhood, gender, and the colonial, postcolonial and modern ordering of life through their eyes and words. Caribbean women enact more than refusal — they instead offer us another account of what it means to be a woman, another narrative of this world and importantly how their narratives of the world hold a profound promise for its transformation.”
— Rinaldo Walcott, Carl V. Granger Chair of Africana and American Studies at the University at Buffalo and author of The Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Black Freedom