Beacon, The

a literary magazine edited by Albert Gomes in Trinidad between 1931 and 1933. It totalled twenty-eight issues, and was revived for one further issue in November 1939. Rather more politically focused than its immediate predecessor, Trinidad, the magazine served, as its editor put it, to debunk ‘bourgeois morality, obscurantist religion and primitive capitalism’. The Beacon therefore aroused bitter opposition, particularly from the colonial authorities and the Catholic Church. Its contributors included such politically radical West Indian writers as the novelists Alfred Mendes and Ralph De Bossière, and the historian C. L. R. James. The Beacon's greatest achievement was to encourage West Indian writers to examine their own societies, and to discard Eurocentric preconceptions and literary conventions. See Reinhard W. Sander and Peter K. Ayers (eds.), From Trinidad: An Anthology of Early West Indian Writing (1978).