W. Adolphe Roberts, These Many Years: An Autobiography
- Submitting institution
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The University of Essex
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 2795
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- University of the West Indies Press
- ISBN
- 978-9766405113
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- March
- Year of publication
- 2015
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This volume is the product of years of research at the National Library of Jamaica: the original manuscript (more than 170,000 words and transcribed in 2011) is a mixture of typescript and typed documents with many amendments and pencilled editions/additions and is part of the 23 boxes which form the W. Adolphe Roberts collection. These Many Years: An Autobiography, hitherto unpublished, is a meticulously researched and carefully edited version which sheds light not only on its author but on the process of Caribbean decolonization and Jamaican nation-building of which he was an indefatigable promoter.
The autobiography is accompanied by an Introduction (pp. xiii-xxiii) which persuasively argues for the importance of the neglected and forgotten Roberts as a central figure of Jamaica’s politics and letters and the value of his autobiography in the context not only of Jamaican/Caribbean history and its reverberations but also in terms of his participation in, and contribution to, the rich transnational connectivity of the region. These Many Years makes a compelling case for Roberts as one of the most interesting, prolific, versatile and accomplished intellectuals of his time and is a crucial intervention also because the Caribbean region has produced very few autobiographies.
The Introduction to the volume is followed by a bibliographical note (pp. xxvii-xxxii) for Roberts’ writings which, on many occasions, appeared in ephemeral magazines: it painstakingly lists many of these hard-to-locate and easily forgotten interventions and also corrects previous misattributions. These Many Years includes 42 carefully selected photographs—mostly excavated from the W. Adolphe Roberts collection at the National Library of Jamaica—which illustrate and document salient people, moments, places, or occasions referred to in the text, 70 pages of cross-referenced annotations (pp. 343-413) which clarify and develop crucial points, and an exhaustive index (pp.415-436).
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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