CARAF books

Ken Bugul

Set against the lingering shadows of colonization, this novel confronts the reader with a clear-eyed exploration of identity, power, and the impulses we struggle to name. Through intimate, searching scenes, it traces how a person comes to recognize the forces that shaped them—and how that recognition can become a hard-won path toward self-possession. The story balances unflinching honesty with a quietly inspirational sensibility, insisting that dignity and agency are possible even when history weighs heavily. With Ken Bugul’s distinctive lyrical intensity and emotional candor, the book offers a profound meditation on belonging, memory, and what it means to claim one’s place in the world.

Edouard Glissant

This sweeping work offers an ambitious, wide-ranging reading of the Caribbean and the broader New World experience—not as a single, settled story, but as a living field of voices, histories, and encounters. Drawing on Glissant’s signature concept of the “arc-en-mer” (the sea-rainbow), the book explores how cultures collide, mingle, and transform, resisting the urge to reduce complex realities into neat systems. Through essays that move across literature, history, and philosophy, it traces the forces of creolization, memory, and relation that shape identity in the wake of displacement and colonial power. Written in Glissant’s lyrical, concept-driven style, the book challenges readers to think with openness and multiplicity, making it essential for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of Caribbean thought and postcolonial possibility.