Critical Perspectives on David Chariandy

Critical Perspectives on David Chariandy explores the fiction written by this Caribbean Canadian writer to bring new perspectives to the existing scholarship on memory, history, trauma, myth, second-generation issues, cultural inheritance and transmission. The works presented in this collection about Chariandy’s novels Soucouyant and Brother consider new aspects and bring a fresh gaze to themes that have previously been explored. Critical Perspectives on David Chariandy presents second-generation Caribbean Canadian cultural affiliation to the Caribbean and North America as an outcome of a self-managed reparatory postcolonial aural transmission. It brings a new exploration of relationships between dementia, animality, forgetting, transformation, and identity, as well as an original analysis of the implications and stakes raised by Canadian middlebrow reception of Soucouyant in 2007. The new readings of Chariandy’s exploration of the relationship between history, memory, and myth, included in this collection, disclose the stakes and scope of the author’s use of the myth of the soucouyant, and of the mythologies of Scarborough and Canada. This collection also approaches Soucouyant as the literary form of a process of searching for healing that operates both at personal and collective levels, demonstrating the author’s use of different types of memories for healing power.