Din as Discourse in the Anglophone Caribbean

This essay discusses Belinda Edmondson’s Creole Noise: Early Caribbean Dialect Literature and Performance (2022). The author shows how Edmondson challenges Standard English dismissals of anglophone Caribbean vernaculars as an inferior form of English and reorients the historical legacy of Anglo-Creoles by pushing against the assumption that these Creoles are a lingua franca restricted to Black folk cultures in the Caribbean. Beginning with European migration to the Caribbean, Creole Noise charts the colonial and postcolonial emergence of robust, creative vernaculars in the anglophone context. The lively, well-written book reveals how multiple constituencies have contributed culturally to the unique Caribbean language variants that refashioned the English language and enriched global literature.