The gayelle is an arena, an area of challenge and contest. In the West Indies the gayelle is best known as the stage for stick fighting, or the pit for illegal cock fighting. But it can also be used as an arena theatre space.

Champions of the Gayelle is the first of the Gayelle collections of plays in the Macmillan Caribbean Writers' Series. These collections feature popular Caribbean plays with outstanding track records in regional Arts and Drama Festivals, together with less widely known and newer plays that have the potential to become tried and tested favourites.

This first collection includes: Alwin Bully's much-loved Dominican comedy, Good Morning, Miss Millie; the perennially successful Duelling Voices by Zeno Constance of Trinidad and the record-breaking drama The Rapist by Jamaica's Pat Cumper.

The three plays in this first Gayelle collection are all community-oriented champions of the larger gayelle of West Indian theatre. In spite of their successful track record, only Good Morning, Miss Millie has been previously published. Macmillan is delighted that Champions of the Gayelle not only revives Alwin Bully's evergreen comedy, it places on record one of Zeno Constance's finest plays and introduces the work of the talented Pat Cumper making these memorable West Indian dramas available to a wider audience.

The remaking of colonial Barbados as a postmodern nation state has its political roots buried deep within the past. In Chattel House Blues, Hilary Beckles sets out to rewrite modern Barbadian history by centring the evolution of the nation in centuries of grassroots struggle. Democracy in Barbados, he argues, as a social, political and cultural reality, has its origins principally within working class demands for freedom, justice and equality and not as a bestowal upon the masses by elites at moments of imperial and colonial enlightenment. In the second volume of his trilogy, Great House Rules: Landless Emancipation and Workers' Protest in Barbados 1838-1938, Prof. Beckles convincingly shows that for the first one hundred years after emancipation, an unbroken chain of resistance, protest and agitation for democratic governance, resulted in a decisive breach in the walls of the structures of white supremacy culminating in the Clement Payne Movement and the Riots of 1937. Black workers and their middle class allies secured Universal Adult Suffrage in 1950 and finally politically independence in 1966, ending the 'Great House Rule' that had begun three hundred years earlier. This process he further argues, reached maturity in 1994 when Owen Arthur, a young man from the chattel house in the plantation tenantry became prime minister. Independence and nationhood, though critical markers in the journey towards social justice and equity d not mean an end to the struggle. The politically enfranchised workers have since risen to an appreciation of their economic rights and the issue of popular economic democracy is now seen as the next step I civil rights development that Barbadians must confront. Chattel House Blues connects current political thinking with the historical process. In producing this work of historical literature that emphasises a people-centred culture of change and transformation, Prof. Beckles' thesis is challenging if not controversial and is bound to result in widespread debate among Barbadians at home and in the diaspora.

Clear Word and Third Sight examines the strands of a collective African Diasporic consciousness in the works of several black Caribbean writers. John shows how a shared consciousness, or third sight, is rooted in both pre-and postcolonial cultural practices and disseminated through a rich oral tradition. This consciousness has served diasporic communities by creating an alternate philosophical worldsense linking those of African descent across space and time. Contesting popular discourses about what constitutes culture and maintaining that neglected strains in Negritude discourse provide a crucial philosophical perspective on the connections between folk practices, cultural memory and collective consciousness, John examines the diasporic principles in the work of the Negritude writers Leopold Damas, Aime Cesaire and Leopold Senghor. She traces the manifestations and reworkings of their ideas in Afro-Caribbean writing from the Eastern and French Caribbean, as well as the Caribbean diaspora in the United States. The authors she discusses include Jamaica Kincaid, Earl Lovelace, Simone Schwarz-Bart, Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall and Edouard Glissant, among others. John argues that by incorporating what she calls folk groundings--such as poems, folktales, proverbs and songs--into their work. Afro-Caribbean writers invoke a psychospiritual consciousness which combines old and new strategics for addressing the ongoing postcolonial struggle.

Collins CAPE Revision Guides focus on the content and skills students need to master for success in CAPE examinations. They cover all aspects of the syllabus and provide excellent help with exam preparation.

Collins CAPE Revision Guides focus on the content and skills students need to master for success in CAPE examinations. They cover all aspects of the syllabus and provide excellent help with exam preparation.