SOURCE: “English Is a Foreign Anguish: Caribbean Writers and the Disruption of the Colonial Canon,” in Decolonizing Tradition: New Views of Twentieth-Century “British” Literary Canons, University of Illinois Press, 1992, pp. 261-78.

In the following essay, Wilentz examines the writings of Caribbean authors who write in English in relation to the British canon.

You taught me language; and my profit on't Is, I know how to curse. 

Caliban, The Tempest

The issue of canon revision and reconstruction goes well beyond the selection of texts, for as Cary Nelson states in “Against English: Theory and the Limits of Discipline”: “The literary text is defended so as to distract attention from the real object to be protected—the profession of literary studies” (47). To examine Caribbean writers who write in English in relation to the British canon we must understand one of the basic tenets of this canon—that of colonialism and...