Mervyn Morris on Orality and Literature in the Critical Landscape

This essay examines Mervyn Morris’s field-defining and groundbreaking contribution to Caribbean literary and cultural criticism, with particular emphasis on the decolonizing orientations of his work. The author emphasizes Morris’s devotion to amplifying the voices of writers and other creative artists who operated outside of mainstream literary and academic circles. The essay places Morris among the pioneering critical voices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, alongside other writers and critics such as Kamau Brathwaite, Edward Baugh, Sylvia Wynter, Édouard Glissant, and C. L. R. James.