Representations of the Chinese in Anglophone Caribbean fiction

In West Indian societies, the Chinese, as relative latecomers, provide an example of a minority group coping with a foreign culture and subject to assessment by earlier arrivants. They often appear only briefly in novels, but their presence contributes to pictures of ‘authentic’ village communities and to impressions of culturally and economically diverse urban centres. Despite their economic links with the communities in which they live, novelists depict them as existing outside the power relations of Creole societies which are determined largely by class and colour oppositions stemming from the experiences of slavery and colonialism.