Daily decolonization : poetry periodicals and newspaper publishing

This chapter considers poetic expressions during the period of transition from the late colonial to the postcolonial public sphere. It focuses on two exemplary moments in 1943: the publication of the first issue of Focus, an anthology of work by a group of Jamaican writers gathered around the artist and editor Edna Manley, and the moment that Louise Bennett secured a weekly column for her Creole verse in the Sunday edition of the national newspaper, the Daily Gleaner. Considering these two events in the context of the dynamics of the Jamaican literary field, the chapter makes a broader argument about the print culture of literary decolonization. Where previous accounts have tended to place emphasis on the importance of the little magazines that emerged during this period, this chapter argues that it was in the daily and weekly newspapers that we see the aesthetic contests that defined the process of cultural decolonization. Bennett, in particular, was focused squarely on colonizing the colonial print culture ‘in reverse’, as she sought to carve out a decolonial public space at the very heart of the colonial public sphere