A Caribbean Poetics of Spirit - Hannah Regis

A Caribbean Poetics of Spirit offers a rare and penetrative exploration into Caribbean literary articulations of non-material and numinous presences. The study incorporates representations of African-Caribbean and Indigenous mythologies, syncretic spirituality, and magico-religious practices. From texts by ten writers, Hannah Regis extracts thematic and poetic references to Caribbean spectrality, its formal properties, and signifying practices to probe the nature and fictional representations of historical futures. Regis links the haunting spectrality of the Middle Passage with the lingering trauma and violence of the plantation order. She then raises the issue of how the latter has impacted complex ontological schema and considers how literary engagement with spirits operates as therapeutic interventions to psychic maladies, and as a potential model for a Caribbean aesthetic.