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This open-access book investigates Francophone Caribbean literature by exploring and analyzing French seventeenth-century travel writings. The book argues for a literary re-examination of the representation of the early colonial Caribbean by proposing theoretical linkages to contemporary Caribbean theories of creolization and archipelagic thinking. Using Édouard Glissant's notion of points of entanglement, Christina Kullberg claims that the historical, social, and political messiness of the Caribbean seventeenth century make for complex representations and expressions, generating textual instability despite the travelers' apparent desires to domesticate the islands. Taking a synoptic approach to travel narratives in French from 1620 up to the publication of Labat's Nouveau voyage aux Isles de l'Amérique in 1722, Kullberg examines textual instances where the islands and the peoples of this period disrupt and unsettle dominant French narratives and enter productively into the construction of knowledge and the representations of the region. Kullberg's contribution is to read French early modern travels in situ as shaped by the archipelagic geography, its history and social formations in order to interrogate both the construction and the limitations of discourses of power.

Arguing that it is time to move beyond the question of language as the key instrument for articulating identity, this essay offers an examination of the visual mode of representation in the aesthetics of the creolist movement. Taking Jacques Rancière's idea of different regimes of writing, the analysis starts by examining what the author calls the regime of visibility and its ontological implications in the 1989 manifesto Éloge de la créolité. This then serves as a basis for a close reading of Patrick Chamoiseau's 2009 novel Les neuf consciences du Malfini, narrated from the perspective of a bird circling above Martinique. The essay claims that the regime of visibility is closely connected to the real, while carrying an almost mythic coefficient. It is precisely this double, paradoxical, capacity of the visual that will appear in full force in the novel, taking identity politics in another direction.

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This open access book complicates and develops the notion of the vernacular. Understood in the linguistic sense as well as an element of the local, the vernacular facilitates the exploration of local and global dynamics. Through exploring the unexamined active role of the local, the indigenous, and the periphery in international literary exchanges, this volume argues that a coherent theorization of the vernacular will enable us to do so. The essays in Vernaculars in an Age of World Literatures present new critical approaches in the debate on world literature, which has given priority to cosmopolitan movements, global circulation of literatures, and metropolitan centers. In nine case studies, approaching narratives from the long 20th century from more or less marginal contexts-such as the Francophone Chinese diaspora, multilingual regions in Spain, West Africa, and the Caribbean-the volume offers theoretical and methodological ways of putting the concept of the vernacular in practice and demonstrates how vernaculars operate within different literary, critical, cultural, and political circumstances. The open access edition of this book is available under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.

Our argument here is that it is not too late for the vernacular, which is to say we should neither view it solely as a residual formation that is fading away quickly, nor solely associate it with often-reactionary, populist political cultures. On the contrary, given the precarious historical moment that we now experience to various degrees of acuteness, critical engagements with literature in the world—what is generally referred to as world literature—prompts a theorization of the vernacular. Our time, shaped by a long century of decolonization, new imperial formations, and emergent new technologies, is indeed an age that requires a different take on the vernacular. We cannot, as was arguably the case when Goethe famously coined the notion of world literature, take the West, or the "canon" or even print culture and the world market as points of departure for thinking literature in the world. Climate crises, rising economic inequalities, platform capitalism, growing populisms and activisms spur new attention to the active role of the local, the indigenous, the minor, and the peripheral in international literary flows and exchanges. This is where our volume wants to make a contribution by rethinking the vernacular through its various practices, functions, and meanings. The case studies brought together here explore the vernacular in different places, cultures, and historical moments. By means of different methodologies from literary studies, anthropology, linguistics, and history of ideas, they testify that the vernacular is not just one thing. It is always plural and shifting. And as a protean category, the vernacular should not be dismissed too quickly as if we always already know what it signifies, but should instead be rethought and explored time and time again for what it tells us about the variegated, uneven globe we inhabit and its cultures.

The outbreak of the 1791–1804 Haitian revolution shook the imperial powers of Europe and the U.S. Never before had the enslaved rebelled so powerfully, and in the decades to come, the name of the once-lucrative colony, Saint-Domingue, provoked anxiety and suspicion. In 2010, Western eyes again turned to Haiti as a devastating earthquake hit the island. Natural forces, together with poverty and inadequate infrastructure, caused a major humanitarian crisis. Taking its point of departure in the intersection of politics and aesthetics, this special issue of Karib probes the global responses to these events and explores the repercussions within the frame of emergent and contemporary modernity.