Book Review: Caribbean discourses: Stylistic and critical discourse approaches to language use in the Caribbean

Clearly indexing the broad scope of Ryan Durgasingh and Nicha Selvon-Ramkissoon’s Caribbean Discourses: Stylistic and Critical Discourse Approaches to Language Use in the Caribbean is the edited collection’s index itself. Among its lengthiest entries (those corresponding to at least 25 pages or page ranges) are Creole, identity, media, metaphor, power, representation and Trinidad and Tobago: a metric of the key thematic foci, prominent analytical approaches, and common case study sources across the book.

To begin, editors Durgasingh and Ramkissoon introduce their collection as a redress to ‘the lacunae of research focused on the [Caribbean] region’s unique uses of linguistic structures in important aspects of socio-political/cultural life’ (2), setting the tone for the five parts and 11 chapters to follow. Having developed from a 2021 digital conference on ‘Stylistics, Critical Discourse Analysis and Language Use in the Caribbean’, its contributors are wide-ranging, including specialists in educational linguistics, media studies and social sciences based in both the Caribbean region and across mainland Europe. Part I, ‘Tracing the Development of Discourses in the Caribbean’, follows with a contextualising introduction to the academic analysis of Caribbean discourse, first with Bettina Migge’s overview of formal developments in Eastern Maroon Creole (predominantly spoken in Suriname and French Guiana), and then in Susanne Mühleisen’s examination of identity management through code-mixing in disparate genres. The two chapters attest to a complex interplay between covert and overt prestige in diglossic societies, as Creole language use is vilified in some contexts and vaunted in others. Moreover, both spotlight the linguistic dexterity and creativity of Creole speakers, who are closely attuned to social perceptions of their discourse across a range of contexts, from radio phone-ins to recipe books.

Part II, headed ‘Discourse and Public Policy’, somewhat strangely comprises a single chapter: co-editor Selvon-Ramkissoon’s ‘Critical Discourse Studies and Curriculum Development in Trinidad and Tobago: Exploring Discursive Practices in Education Policy’. Informed by a Hallidayan Systemic Functional Grammar approach, she considers multiple drafts of policy documents, tracing the positioning of Creole language and concluding that it is frequently dismissed as inappropriate for formal use. Given that its primary focus is again the perception of Creole language in varying social contexts, Chapter 4 would have been equally suited to Part I, which would have had the added benefit of encouraging comparisons to be drawn between the linguistic environment in Suriname and French Guiana (Chapter 2) and that in Trinidad and Tobago (Chapters 3 and 4).

Conversely, the three chapters which comprise the next section, ‘Discursive Constructions of the Caribbean Prime Minister’, are well paired in this politics-focused third part. While Parts I and II tallied with the index keywords of Creole, identity and power, Part III aligns best with those of media, representation and metaphor. These latter two keywords, in particular, come to the fore in Chapter 5 from Karen Sanderson Cole, which examines the autobiography of Dr Eric Eustace Williams, the first Prime Minister of independent Trinidad and Tobago. Focusing on the implications of conceptual metaphor in Williams’ development of self-concept, primarily through the a leader is a teacher trope, Sanderson Cole adopts a broader than standard approach, arguing that while the events of Williams’ life as presented in the autobiography are collectively the target, Williams’ life more holistically is the source, for the former enables his understanding of the latter. While this is an intriguing expansion of conceptual metaphor theory, it dilutes slightly the original framework in framing conceptual metaphor as mere heuristic exercise, rather than a structure engrained in our understanding of everyday experience. Instead, the chapter works best where the analysis takes finer-grained form, for instance when considering the subtle interplay of the simple past and past perfect in the case study autobiography as indicative of turning points in Williams’ life. In Chapter 6, Rajendra Shepherd’s textual focus is the lesser-studied newspaper editorial, which she suggests is ‘media self-referent, providing meta-commentary’ (150) on topical political events and thus reflecting societal perceptions. Interestingly, Shepherd observes that Creole language is ‘under-utilised’ (156) within her editorial dataset, with the absence of this ‘collective cultural resource’ (155) here proving just as striking as its presence in the case study texts of Chapters 2 to 4. In Chapter 7, the focus shifts to Jamaica’s incumbent Prime Minister, Andrew Holness, as Kadian Walters traces the trajectory of Holness’s public persona from ‘from celebrated to denigrated’ (179), captured in social media commentary on the platforms Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. With Walters rightly contending that ‘[p]olitical discourse is no longer controlled by political institutions and affiliates’ (207), this is an insightful approach that gauges popular opinion and underscores its capricious nature.

Gathering together the book’s more overtly stylistics-focused chapters is Part IV, ‘Stylistic Appraisals of Caribbean Literary Discourse’, which begins with co-editor Durgasingh’s analysis of V.S. Naipaul’s classic novel, A House for Mr Biswas (1961) in Chapter 8. Joint focus is placed upon psychological perspective and transitivity, with the text’s stylistic features tied to its wider thematic focus as Durgasingh casts the titular Biswas as a metonym for a beleaguered colonial state. In this way, Durgasingh’s chapter aligns with recent work by Esterino Adami (2025) on the shared aims of stylistics and postcolonial studies, which have yet to be properly formalised into a postcolonial stylistics. Moving from Naipaul to another renowned Trinidadian author, Chapter 9 by Karen Mah-Chamberlain examines Samuel Selvon’s An Island is a World (1955), here considering code-switching in a fictional context and explaining how its use may impact upon a novel’s discourse architecture through ‘collaps[ing] the distance between the space, time […] and identity of the character, the narrator, and the author’ (255). Likewise, Chapter 10 from Geraldine Skeete concentrates on the ‘the interplay of voice and perspective’ (260) in Paul Keens-Douglas’s illustrated book Tanti at de Oval (2005), a text which retains roots in its oral origins. While lesser-known than either Naipaul or Selvon, Keens-Douglas is still another author who hails from Trinidad and Tobago – it would have been interesting to widen the stylistic scope of this fourth, stylistics-based section to consider Caribbean authors from beyond these shores. Indeed, this aligns with something of an imbalance across the book as a whole: while 15 nations comprise the Anglophone Caribbean that this collection seeks to linguistically scrutinise (1), only two – Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago – ever form the primary focus of analysis, with the latter far outweighing the former (as captured by the keywords of the book’s index).

Part V, the book’s final part, examines ‘Gender, Media, and Discourse in the Caribbean’, with Chapter 11 by Eleonora Esposito alongside editors Selvon-Ramkissoon and Durgasingh and Chapter 12 by Godfrey A. Steele both exploring the nexus of gender-based violence and media representation. For the former chapter, the media in question is social and digital, as the authors engage with comments left on the platform Facebook, in this instance concerning three high profile Trinidad and Tobago femicide cases, thus adopting what they term a Social Media – Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS) approach. Across the chapter, they consider conceptualisations of the ideal victim and, correspondingly, the ideal perpetrator, critiquing the tendency for these constructs to enable a culture of victim blaming. To conclude, the authors align socially ingrained misogyny and misogynoir with ‘an ongoing reliance on (post) colonial ideologies and their dehumanizing effect, grounded in a legitimization of violence as a social instrument of control and in a pervasive normalization of violent sexualization and objectification of women and girls’ (316). Indeed, the chapter is a sobering reminder of the Caribbean’s position as a region with one of the world’s highest rates of femicide: recent studies list four Anglophone Caribbean nations among the top 10 most affected (Statista, 2021), including the book’s primary geographical foci of Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago. This bleak picture is one replicated in Steele’s subsequent chapter, which takes a multimodal discourse analytic approach to explore the ways in which gender-based violence in print and broadcast media can be more equitably represented, and thus received. Ultimately, both chapters are timely and sensitive accounts of a harrowing societal issue, well-served by the critical discourse analytic framework that they adopt.

Overall, and despite its subtitle, the book is certainly more biased towards a critical discourse than a stylistic approach, with stylistic analyses largely restricted to the collection’s penultimate section and rarely integrated into CDS-based chapters. Nonetheless, several of these chapters will be of interest to stylisticians, alongside critical discourse analysts and sociolinguists, for the insights they provide into Caribbean discourse across a variety of contexts, from policy documents to social media posts, newspaper editorials to postcolonial fiction. Indeed, the extensive range of case studies in Caribbean Discourses distinguishes the collection from other publications on the language of the region, which often take a far narrower focus (for instance concentrating solely on Caribbean literary discourse, as in Lalla et al., 2014). Condensing the study of an entire region’s discourse into a representative, book-length form is an unenviable task, but on balance one which the editors of and contributors to Caribbean Discourses have managed with aplomb.