The essays in this collection focus on the rich dialogue carried out in David Dabydeen’s critically acclaimed body of writing. Dialogue across diversity and the simultaneous habitation of multiple arenas are seen as dominant characterics of his work. Essays by Aleid Fokkema, Tobias Döring, Heike Härting 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 Turner’s painting and in Fanon’s classic works on colonisation. Lee Jenkins and Pumla Gqola explore Dabydeen’s fondness for intertextual reference, his dialogue with canonic authority and ideas about the masculine in his work. Michael Mitchell, Mark Stein, Christine Pagnoulle and Gail Low focus on 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 The Art of David Dabydeen.

Lynne Macedo currently lectures at the Centre for Caribbean Studies, University of Warwick. She is the author of Fiction and Film: The Influence of Cinema on Writers in Jamaica and Trinidad.