Blues and Bliss: The Poetry of George Elliott Clarke
Blues singer, preacher, cultural critic, exile, Africadian, high modernist, spoken word artist, Canadian poet—these are but some of the voices of George Elliott Clarke. In a selection of Clarke’s best work from his early poetry to his most recent, Blues and Bliss: The Poetry of George Elliott Clarke offers readers an impressive cross-section of those voices.
"'Mi have to work': La domesticité des enfants en Jamaïque, 1920-1970" in Situations Contemporaines de Servitude et d'Esclavage: Anthropologie et sociétés, 41 (1), 147-177
Among the tens of thousands of workers who built the domestic employment sector in the XX th century in Jamaica there were young people, most of them young girls, and a few still "children." While some were recruited as paid maids, others were placed (sometimes in the form of informal 'adoptions') in households where they performed domestic chores […]
Black
Blistering with defiance, tempered with tenderness and desire, Black is a startlingly passionate collection of poems from one of Canada’s most gifted writers. George Elliott Clarke combines fiery outrage with delicate confessions of love, creating a commentary on soul and culture that is both shocking and transformative.
"Returns to a Native Land?' Indigeneity and Decolonisation in the Anglophone Caribbean" in Small Axe, 41, 108-122
This essay explores the narrative of “aboriginal absence,” arguably the foundational colonial myth of Caribbean history. Since the early colonial period, the space of the “native” in the Caribbean context has been treated as a space left vacant for others to fill. Beginning in the 1960s, this narrative of aboriginal absence was widely incorporated across […]