 | This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these template messages)
|
Raymond R. Ramcharitar is a Trinidadian poet, playwright, fiction writer, historian and media and cultural critic.
Ramcharitar was educated at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, where he earned three degrees: a Bachelor's in Economics (1991), a Master's in Literature in English (2002) and a Doctorate in Cultural History (2007). He was awarded a fellowship to Boston University's Creative Writing Program in 2000 by Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, where he studied poetry and drama.
Ramcharitar's published works include academic and creative books and articles. His book The Island Quintet (fiction), a collection of novellas, was published by Peepal Tree Press, UK, 2009. [1] It was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book, 2010 for the Caribbean & Canada. The Island Quintet was reviewed in the Trinidad & Tobago Review. A reviewer for The Independent compared Ramcharitar's prose to that of Derek Walcott and V. S. Naipaul. [2]
American Fall, a collection of poems described as "confident and engaging", [3] was published by Peepal Tree in 2007.
He published a historical work, A History of Creole Trinidad, 1956-2010 [4] A book of media criticism, Breaking the News, Media & Culture in Trinidad, was published by Lexicon, a Trinidadian publisher (2005).
Ramcharitar's play Paradiso was one of three winners of the Warehouse Theatre's 2002 International Playwriting Festival, and he was invited to the BBC in September 2003, on a radio drama fellowship.
His work as a poet is, unusually for contemporary Caribbean poets, highly formal and entirely in Standard English. He uses traditional forms such as the sonnet, villanelle and sestina. He is influenced by Walcott, Philip Larkin, R. S. Thomas and Wallace Stevens.
As a fiction writer, he has been compared to V. S. Naipaul, but his explicit sensuality and tendency to experimentation display debts to writers as diverse as Umberto Eco and Thomas Pynchon. The epigraph to The Island Quintet was from Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow .
As an academic Ramcharitar is a polemical revisionist. [5] His latest work is A History of Creole Trinidad, 1956-2010 (Palgrave Macmillan), which presents a narrative considerably at odds with nationalist histories of Trinidad & Tobago. His doctoral thesis ("The Hidden History of Trinidad: Underground Culture in Trinidad, 1870-1970") provided a "corrective" narrative to the largely ethno-centric historical narratives of West Indian nationalist historians. He has published similarly oriented articles on culture and tourism, [6] literary criticism [7] and history. [8] His work on media and culture—media and collective memory, and the Caribbean emotional economy—seeks to establish a presence in largely untapped areas of Caribbean or West Indian cultural, critical, and media scholarship.
Ramcharitar has lectured in theatre arts, cultural studies, and literature as an adjunct at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, and as a Communications Consultant in Trinidad. He started writing as a journalist in 1991, working with the Trinidad Guardian , and the Trinidad Express newspapers.
He is currently and Assistant Professor of the Humanities at the American University in Iraq, Baghdad.
References
This article is about the demography of the population of Trinidad and Tobago including population density, ethnicity, education level, health of the populace, economic status, religious affiliations and other aspects of the population.
Harold Sonny Ladoo was a Caribbean novelist, who was the author of two books documenting the struggles of living in poverty in the Hindu communities of Trinidad and Tobago. He moved to Canada in 1968 and was mysteriously murdered while on a visit to Trinidad in 1973.
Afro-Trinidadians and Tobagonians are people from Trinidad and Tobago who are of Sub-Saharan African descent, mostly from West Africa. Social interpretations of race in Trinidad and Tobago are often used to dictate who is of West African descent. Mulatto-Creole, Dougla, Blasian, Zambo, Maroon, Pardo, Quadroon, Octoroon or Hexadecaroon (Quintroon) were all racial terms used to measure the amount of West African ancestry someone possessed in Trinidad and Tobago and throughout North American, Latin American and Caribbean history.
The culture of Trinidad and Tobago reflects the influence of Indian-South Asian, African, Indigenous, European, Chinese, North American, Latino, and Arab cultures. The histories of Trinidad and Tobago are different. There are differences in the cultural influences which have shaped each island. Trinidad and Tobago is an English-speaking country with strong links to the United Kingdom.
Michael Anthony HBM was a Trinidadian author and historian, who was named by CNC3 as one of the "50 most influential people in Trinidad and Tobago".
Trinidad and Tobago, officially the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, is the southernmost island country in the Caribbean. Consisting of the main islands Trinidad and Tobago and numerous much smaller islands, it is situated 11 kilometres off the coast of northeastern Venezuela and 130 kilometres south of Grenada. It shares maritime boundaries with Barbados to the east, Grenada to the northwest and Venezuela to the south and west. Trinidad and Tobago is generally considered to be part of the West Indies. The island country's capital is Port of Spain, while its largest and most populous municipality is Chaguanas.
Caribbean literature is the literature of the various territories of the Caribbean region. Literature in English from the former British West Indies may be referred to as Anglo-Caribbean or, in historical contexts, as West Indian literature. Most of these territories have become independent nations since the 1960s, though some retain colonial ties to the United Kingdom. They share, apart from the English language, a number of political, cultural, and social ties which make it useful to consider their literary output in a single category. The more wide-ranging term "Caribbean literature" generally refers to the literature of all Caribbean territories regardless of language—whether written in English, Spanish, French, Hindustani, or Dutch, or one of numerous creoles.
Vahni Anthony Ezekiel Capildeo is a Trinidad and Tobago-born British writer, and a member of the extended Capildeo family that has produced notable Trinidadian politicians and writers.
Trinidad and Tobago literature has its roots in oral storytelling among African slaves, the European literary roots of the French creoles and in the religious and folk tales of the Indian indentured immigrants. It blossomed in the 20th century with the writings of C. L. R. James, V. S. Naipaul and Saint Lucian-born Derek Walcott as part of the growth of West Indian literature.
The term Caribbean culture summarizes the artistic, musical, literary, culinary, political and social elements that are representative of Caribbean people all over the world.
Kris Rampersad is a writer, researcher, lecturer, journalist, publisher, activist and advocate from Trinidad and Tobago.
Gordon Rohlehr was a Guyana-born scholar and critic of West Indian literature, noted for his study of popular culture in the Caribbean, including oral poetry, calypso and cricket. He pioneered the academic and intellectual study of Calypso, tracing its history over several centuries, writing a landmark work entitled Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad (1989), and is considered the world's leading authority on its development.
Marina Ama Omowale Maxwell, also known as Marina Maxwell and Marina Maxwell Omowale, is a Trinidadian playwright, performer, poet and novelist. She was associated with the Caribbean Artists Movement in London in the late 1960s, working with Edward Kamau Brathwaite, while back in the Caribbean she was responsible for developing the experimental Yard Theatre, which was "an attempt to place West Indian theatre in the life of the people [...] to find it in the yards where people live and are." The concept of "yard theatre" was considered revolutionary, according to Brathwaite, because it not only "rejected/ignored... traditional/ colonial Euro-American theatre," it also "provided a viable and creative alternative."
Nicholas Laughlin is a writer and editor from Trinidad and Tobago. He has been editor of The Caribbean Review of Books since 2004, and also edits the arts and travel magazine Caribbean Beat. He is the festival and programme director of the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, having worked alongside founder and managing director Marina Salandy-Brown since 2011.
Mohamed Ismith Khan, better known as Ismith Khan, was a Trinidad and Tobago-born American author and educator. He is best known for his novel The Jumbie Bird, a semi-autobiographical work which blends Indian and Afro-Caribbean mythology and experience to explore the creation of a new Indo-Caribbean identity.
The Jumbie Bird is the first novel by Trinidad and Tobago-born novelist Ismith Khan. Published in 1961, the semi-autobiographical novel tells the story of the Khan family, an Indo-Trinidadian Muslim family living in Port of Spain. The novel explores the transformation of formerly indentured Indian immigrants in Trinidad and Tobago into Indo-Trinidadians.
Kevin Jared Hosein is a Caribbean novelist and short-story writer from Trinidad and Tobago. He is known for winning the 2018 Commonwealth Short Story Prize with his story "Passage". He also won the regional (Caribbean) section of the prize in 2015, with "The King of Settlement 4".
Sharon Millar is a Trinidadian writer. She was awarded the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2013 for "The Whale House".
Trinidadian Spanish refers to the Spanish natively spoken by Cocoa Panyols in Trinidad and Tobago which is very close to extinction.
