Emmanuel Appadocca; or, Blighted Life: A Tale of the Boucaneers

This 1854 novel traces a mulatto son's quest for vengeance against his white father, a sugar planter who abandoned him and his mother. Intent on redeeming his mother's honor and outraged by the cruelty and greed that slavery has engendered Appadocca sails the seas with a band of ruthless pirates on a ship named the Black Schooner. The novel, written by the important activist and intellectual Michel Maxwell Philip (1829-1888) deals with themes, symbols, and literary techniques that are reminiscent of other major authors such as Melville, Douglass, and Stowe. This new edition with scholarly commentaries and annotations will reorient our understanding of the development of Caribbean literature in relation to English and American literary production.

MICHEL MAXWELL PHILIP (1829-1888) was a novelist, lawyer, and civil servant from Trinidad. After completing an education at St. Mary's Catholic College in Scotland, he traveled between England and Trinidad, writing and studying law. He passed the bar and published his novel, Emmanuel Appadocca, in the same year. While he never wrote another book, he went on to be the Mayor of Port of Spain, where he is celebrated to this day.

SELWYN R CUDJOE is a Professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley College. As a Trinidadian academic, historian, essayist, and editor, Cudjoe specializes in the literature and intellectual history of the Caribbean. He's written Beyond Boundaries: The Intellectual Tradition of Trinidad and Tobago in the Nineteenth Century (2002), The Role of Resistance in Caribbean Literature (2010), and Caribbean Visionary: A. R. F. Webber and the Making of the Guyanese Nation (2011). Cudjoe has also assisted in editing Caribbean Women Writers and Narratives of Amerindians in Trinidad and Tobago; or, Becoming Trinbagonian.

WILLIAM E CAIN is a Mary Jewett Gaiser Professor of English at Wellesley University. He has written The Crisis in Criticism: Theory, Literature, and Reform in English Studies (1984), F.O. Mathiessen and the Politics of Criticism (1988), A Short Guide to Writing about Literature (2000) with Sylvan Barnet, and An Introduction to Literature: Fiction, Poetry, Drama with Sylvan Barnet and William Burto.