No Land, No Mother

The essays in this collection focus on the rich dialogue carried out in David Dabydeen's increasingly diverse and critically acclaimed body of writing. Dialogue across diversity and the simultaneous habitation of multiple arenas are seen as dominant characteristics of his work. Essays by Aleid Fokkema, Tobias Doring, Heike Harting and Madina Tlostanova provide rewardingly complex readings of Dabydeen's 'Turner', locating it within a revived tradition of Caribbean epic (with reference to Walcott, Glissant and Arion), as subverting and appropriating the romantic aesthetics of the sublime and in the connections between the concept of terror in both Turner's painting and in Fanon's classic works on colonisation. Lee Jenkins and Pumla Gqola explore Dabydeen's fondness for intertextual reference, with the nature of canonic authority and ideas about the masculine. Michael Mitchell, Mark Stein, Christine Pagnoulle and Gail Low focus Dabydeen's more recent fiction, "Disappearance", "A Harlot's Progress" and "The Counting House".
By dealing with his more recent work and looking more closely at Dabydeen's Indo-Guyanese background, this collection complements the earlier "Art of David Dabydeen".