Wadabagei: feature on "West Indian Review"

In the latest issue of Wadabagei, Carl Wade of the University of the West Indies in Cave Hill, Barbados, assesses the relevance and impact of the West Indian Review, a literary magazine, founded in Jamaica in 1934 by British journalist, novelist and playwright Esther Chapman.

The West Indian Review was published from 1934 until the 1970s, mostly as a monthly and frequently in numbers of over eighty pages, and contained poetry and fiction as well as articles on painting, sculpture, folklore, history, agriculture and other topics. Unlike many similar publication in the region it was not the organ of any intellectual or nationalist group, and remained supported by commercial advertising through its existence.

Wade’s article highlights the noteworthy perception by the Review of the West Indies as a single constituency encompassing Anglophone as well as Francophone and Hispanic regions and states that this perception “may be unique among hemispheric enterprises of any epoch”. The Review’s conservative political agenda is revealed – with editorials which criticised the views of Italian-Ethiopian war as a racial war, which opposed political federation of the British West Indies, and expressed scepticism about the fledgling People’s National Party, its leaders and its progressive agenda, as well as opposing the establishment of universal enfranchisement. Despite these views Wade concludes that the Review played an important role as a catalyst for a regional literary awakening, stating that “the review’s most vital contribution to the literary awakening was its advocacy of West Indian ‘subjectivity’…emphasized in the repeated commitment to ‘keep the publication entirely West Indian’, and in the stipulation that submissions should be ‘West Indian in background or character’”

The Institute of Commonwealth Studies holds copies of the West Indian Review, on microfilm, from its inception in 1934 until October 1955.

Wade, Carl A. (2008) “Re-Imagining a Community: The West Indian Review, 1934-1940” Wadabagei, Vol. 11. No. 3