Since the 1970s, scholars have perceived the revolutionary moment in Trinidadian literature as taking place in the 1930s. The Beacon group, which emerged from a coterie of 1930s Trinidadian writers, was perceived as an inspired, iconoclastic precursor to the internationally-acclaimed 1950s generation of Caribbean writers. Post-1970s research, however, has drawn attention to the Beacon group's occasional conservatism, such as Alfred Mendes’ devaluation of Africa's cultural wealth. The problematic schisms of the Beacon group add extra complexity to the historiography of Trinidadian literature and call for a closer reading of Port of Spain's literary geography. Rather than the monologic imposition of empire or the consistent march of progressive anti-colonialism, such contradictions act as a reminder of the fractious history and geography of the region. Mary Louise Pratt writes of the ‘contact zones … where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination’. Peter Hulme similarly elucidates, ‘no smooth history emerges, but rather a series of fragments, which read speculatively and hint at a story that can never be fully recovered’. Thus colonial and anti-colonial discourses across the American tropics emerge as palimpsests ‘made up of a variety of conflicting and contradictory frameworks’. Trinidad in the 1930s was no exception, as Harvey R. Neptune contends, perceiving the colony's emergent nationalist mobilisation as ‘strategic, uneven and at times ambiguous’.