First of all, I would like to thank my wife Pauline and my entire family, more specifically, my father and mother, for always believing in me, and helping me out for everything.
Fred D’Aguiar, thank you very much for your patience, kindness, and art.
I am also very grateful to Marguerite Derrida for the gift, mediated by Thomas Dutoit, of beautiful editions of Jacques Derrida’s books.
An enormous thank you to Thomas Dutoit, for helping me, through six years (and counting) of collaboration, to figure out what it is to read and teach literature. Huge thanks must also go to Fiona McCann for her patient reading of this work’s first draft. Many thanks to Bruce E. Graver for kindly sending me his wonderful work on Wordsworth and Orpheus. My gratitude also goes to Bénédicte Ledent and Isabelle Boof-Vermesse for unconditional support and kindness.
Many thanks to Francis Gentry for his generosity, and for copy-editing this work.
Last but not least, thanks are due to the École Doctorale de Lille – Nord de France, the Conseil Régional du Nord pas de Calais, and the CECILLE laboratory, without whose funding this monograph could not have been written.
The suggestion that Caribbean identity is cross-cultural, if frequent, should not be read as a commonplace here: we, like Glissant and Derrida, imply that every culture (not only Caribbean culture) is, by definition, cross-cultural, although the core of our interest, in this book, is how this cross-culturality operates and/or is generated in Caribbean literature and, more precisely, in what Fred D'Aguiar does to the English language to make such cross-culturality palpable.