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Tradition and the Postcolonial Talent: T. S. Eliot versus E. K. Brathwaite

Matthew Hart

in Nations of Nothing But Poetry: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Synthetic Vernacular Writing

This chapter explores the relation between Edward Kamau Brathwaite's Caribbean “nation language” poetics and the poems and critical essays of T. S. Eliot. Reading Brathwaite's epic sequence, The ... More

This chapter explores the relation between Edward Kamau Brathwaite's Caribbean “nation language” poetics and the poems and critical essays of T. S. Eliot. Reading Brathwaite's epic sequence, The Arrivants (1967–73) alongside his essays from the same period, the chapter explains how Eliot's ideas about poetic language and literary tradition provided an agonistic model for Brathwaite's creation of an archipelagic “nation language.” In doing so, it makes three key interventions in this developing field. First, the chapter rejects traditional narratives of postcolonial belatedness in favor of a dynamic model of literary influence that emphasizes the Caribbean poet's ability to resynthesize his problematic Euro‐American inheritance. Second, it admits the insular nature of Eliot's late poetic, but refuses to make Eliot a straw man for modernist Eurocentrism. Finally, it rejects the picture of Brathwaite as a racial essentialist, reading his “nation language” poetics as a product of the uniquely reflexive sovereignties of the postcolonial Caribbean.Less

Metropolitan Modernism and Its West Indian Interlocutors

Peter J. Kalliney

in Commonwealth of Letters: British Literary Culture and the Emergence of Postcolonial Aesthetics

Chapter Four examines the BBC's role as a major patron of Caribbean writing in the 1950s and 60s through Caribbean Voices, a weekly literary program. Using extensive archival sources, this chapter ... More

Chapter Four examines the BBC's role as a major patron of Caribbean writing in the 1950s and 60s through Caribbean Voices, a weekly literary program. Using extensive archival sources, this chapter argues that the BBC served both imperialist and anti-imperialist agendas at the same time. Although the BBC, through its overseas programming, was designed to maintain a cultural empire of English speakers, Caribbean writers used the organization for their own purposes, allowing them to subtly criticize metropolitan dominance. Additionally, important "Windrush" writers such as George Lamming, VS Naipaul, and Sam Selvon parlayed their experience at the BBC into concrete professional opportunities in London.Less

Questioning the Construction of Dogma

Jason Herbeck

in Architextual Authenticity: Constructing Literature and Literary Identity in the French Caribbean

As a means of situating the correlative concepts of authenticity and identity within the historical context of the region, the Introduction discusses the frustrated notion of origins in the French ... More

As a means of situating the correlative concepts of authenticity and identity within the historical context of the region, the Introduction discusses the frustrated notion of origins in the French Caribbean and the inherent obstacles faced in negotiating a murky, ambivalent, (pre)colonial past. After an initial assessment and discussion of what the authors of Éloge de la Créolité describe as the “domination of an elsewhere”—the external forces to which the colonized is subject as a direct result of the colonial project—critical attention is devoted to the different means of identity-building that have been proposed by French-Caribbean authors and critics. In subsequently asserting that “reading structure” in the region’s vibrant literature corpus illustrates well how endeavors of authenticity in the French Caribbean might be both conceived and realized in literary terms, the chapter concludes by clarifying the dual methodological approach (architectural and architextual) that constitutes the framework of analysis for this book.Less

For Continuity: FR Leavis, Kamau Brathwaite, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

Peter J. Kalliney

in Commonwealth of Letters: British Literary Culture and the Emergence of Postcolonial Aesthetics

Chapter Three examines the influence of FR Leavis, architect of the Great Tradition, on the thinking of Kamau Brathwaite and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, two of the leading theorists of postcolonial ... More

Chapter Three examines the influence of FR Leavis, architect of the Great Tradition, on the thinking of Kamau Brathwaite and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, two of the leading theorists of postcolonial literature. The chapter argues that Leavis's emphasis on a "living language," as he called it - that is, his belief that a robust spoken dialect is the basis of any great literary tradition - would be rearticulated by Brathwaite and Ngũgĩ in their calls for vernacular literature. The chapter goes on to discuss the close but fractious connections between the English department and postcolonial literature, arguing that Leavis's complex professional relationship with the discipline was one of his major bequests to postcolonial studies.Less

Gouverneurs de la … Mangrove: Architextual Authenticity in Maryse Condé’s Traversée de la Mangrove

Jason Herbeck

in Architextual Authenticity: Constructing Literature and Literary Identity in the French Caribbean

As a means of illustrating the central albeit conflicted place that issues of authenticity occupy in the French Caribbean, Chapter 3 examines Guadeloupean Maryse Condé’s canonical novel, Traversée de ... More

As a means of illustrating the central albeit conflicted place that issues of authenticity occupy in the French Caribbean, Chapter 3 examines Guadeloupean Maryse Condé’s canonical novel, Traversée de la Mangrove (1989). Consideration of the somewhat heated discussion of Caribbean authenticity prompted by Patrick Chamoiseau’s public reading of Condé’s novel, in evidencing the authors’ stark differences of opinion on the matter, also serves to further inform the fundamentally identitarian dilemmas surrounding the construction of French-Caribbean expression. Subsequent close textual analysis of Traversée de la Mangrove on two distinct architextual and architectural levels illustrates how issues of authenticity are divulged and addressed in the text. Additional consideration of the novel’s architextual properties—in particular with respect to Haitian Jacques Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la Rosée (1944)—leads, in conclusion, to an examination of the architectural significance of the house that Condé’s main character inhabits and in which he undertakes the (metatextual) project of writing a novel entitled Traversée de la Mangrove.Less

Tropical Apocalypse: Globalization and the Caribbean End Times

Martin Munro

in Caribbean Globalizations, 1492 to the Present Day

This chapter examines the relationship between the theory and experience of the apocalypse in the complex, globalized, present, and in Caribbean history. It first considers images of the apocalypse ... More

This chapter examines the relationship between the theory and experience of the apocalypse in the complex, globalized, present, and in Caribbean history. It first considers images of the apocalypse and strands of millenarian thought in Caribbean literature argues that the apocalyptic reality of the present, globalized world is a reflection of processes and discourses that have long informed Caribbean thought and lived experience. In contrast to Édouard Glissant’s assertion that the world is creolizing, this chapter suggests that the world is apocalypsizing and that the world is catching up with a reality that has long informed Caribbean experience. Finally, it shows how the processes of modernization and globalization lead societies ever closer to an apocalyptic abyss.Less

When Revolution Is Not Enough: Tracing the Limits of Black Radicalism in Dionne Brand’s Chronicles of the Hostile Sun and In Another Place, Not Here

Laurie R. Lambert

in The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present

This chapter analyzes Dionne Brand’s poetry collection, Chronicles of the Hostile Sun (1984), and her novel In Another Place, Not Here (1996). While Chronicles pinpoints the misrepresentation of the ... More

This chapter analyzes Dionne Brand’s poetry collection, Chronicles of the Hostile Sun (1984), and her novel In Another Place, Not Here (1996). While Chronicles pinpoints the misrepresentation of the Grenada Revolution in anti-revolutionary narratives emanating from American imperialism, In Another Place highlights how structures of healing and alternative epistemologies of black radicalism are developed between queer women who are on the margins of both the postcolonial Caribbean nation and the revolution intended to subvert American imperialist forces. Brand’s writing interrogates the black radical tradition in search of a radical feminist politics that can account for gender and sexuality alongside race and class.Less

Style as Habitus: World Literature, Decolonization and Caribbean Voices

Michael Niblett

in Bourdieu and Postcolonial Studies

This chapter yokes a world-systems perspective to Pierre Bourdieu’s insights into the production of the meaning and value of cultural works. Drawing on Franco Moretti’s recent suggestion that we ... More

This chapter yokes a world-systems perspective to Pierre Bourdieu’s insights into the production of the meaning and value of cultural works. Drawing on Franco Moretti’s recent suggestion that we consider literary style as habitus, the chapter analyses how transformations in global political economy might be related to struggles over the style of submissions to the BBC radio programme Caribbean Voices, broadcast between 1944 and 1958. Specifically, it explores how the changing configuration of class alliances in the post-war era may have inflected the kinds of tastes and preferences expressed by the programme’s editor Henry Swanzy. More than simply an effort to contextualize Swanzy’s attitude to the material he broadcast, this approach seeks to show how the logistics of the capitalist world-economy manifest themselves in the dispositions of the agents of cultural production and the work they create.Less

Jean Rhys: Left Bank Modernist as Postcolonial Intellectual

Peter J. Kalliney

in Commonwealth of Letters: British Literary Culture and the Emergence of Postcolonial Aesthetics

Chapter Seven examines the evolution of Jean Rhys's long and unusual career. In the 1920s and 30s, Rhys was a typical member of the expatriate artist community of the Left Bank. In the 1940s and 50s, ... More

Chapter Seven examines the evolution of Jean Rhys's long and unusual career. In the 1920s and 30s, Rhys was a typical member of the expatriate artist community of the Left Bank. In the 1940s and 50s, however, she disappeared, staging an improbable comeback in the 1960s, culminating in the release of Wide Sargasso Sea and the republication of her earlier fiction. In those intervening years, however, a number of high-profile Caribbean writers had come to the attention of metropolitan critics and audiences. This chapter situates Rhys's changing depictions of racial difference in this long context, exploring the subtle continuities and equally subtle differences between her interwar fiction and her postcolonial writing.Less

Calling the West Indies: Una Marson’s Wireless Black Atlantic

Ian Whittington

in Writing the Radio War: Literature, Politics and the BBC, 1939-1945

As a colonial subject and woman of colour, Una Marson occupies a unique place in the history of wartime broadcasting in Britain. Her weekly programCalling the West Indies began as a “message home” ... More

As a colonial subject and woman of colour, Una Marson occupies a unique place in the history of wartime broadcasting in Britain. Her weekly programCalling the West Indies began as a “message home” program for Caribbean soldiers stationed in the UK but grew, as the war progressed, into a literary and cultural forum for writers from across the Black Atlantic. Though barred from advocating openly for independence, Marson used her program to promote West Indian cultural autonomy by spotlighting emerging Caribbean literary figures and forging connections with activists and intellectuals from the U.S., Britain, Africa, and elsewhere. Beyond building such transatlantic networks, Calling the West Indies afforded listeners in the Caribbean the first opportunities to hear literature spoken in the West Indian forms of English which Edward Kamau Brathwaite would go on to call “nation language.” By focusing on Marson’s wartime work, this chapter rectifies a persistent tendency, in histories of Caribbean literature and broadcasting, to omit not only the central role played by this progressive feminist intellectual, but also the role of the war itself as catalyst to the postwar literary renaissance in the West Indies.Less

Maryse Condé: Post-Postcolonial?

Typhaine Leservot

in Postcolonial Thought in the French-speaking World

Born in 1937 in Guadeloupe, Maryse Condé was sent by her parents to pursue her studies in France at the age of sixteen. She earned her BA in English and Classical Literatures from the Sorbonne in ... More

Born in 1937 in Guadeloupe, Maryse Condé was sent by her parents to pursue her studies in France at the age of sixteen. She earned her BA in English and Classical Literatures from the Sorbonne in Paris, married African actor Mamadou Condé in 1959, and moved to Africa a year later. Condé came back to France in 1973, completed her doctorate in comparative literature at the Sorbonne in 1975, and moved to the United States in the late 1980s. Her oeuvre spans almost forty years and includes novels, short stories, critical essays, and plays. In 1993, Condé became the first Francophone Caribbean writer to receive the Puterbaugh Prize. Her work can be characterised as a sustained and insightful exploration of Caribbean identity and, in particular, négritude, antillanité, and créolité. The quest to define Caribbean identity is a common feature of twentieth-century Caribbean literature. Condé's fiction and essays now occupy a central place in Francophone postcolonial studies and contribute to postcolonial theory and postcolonial thought by consistently criticising its dogmatic approach to race, ethnicity, gender, culture, and history.Less

Reconquering Dimensions: No Place Like Home

Jason Herbeck

in Architextual Authenticity: Constructing Literature and Literary Identity in the French Caribbean

By way of a brief summary of Ulysses’ return from Troy to Ithaca in Homer’s The Odyssey, the Conclusion begins by juxtaposing the fundamentally different notions of the house as found in traditional ... More

By way of a brief summary of Ulysses’ return from Troy to Ithaca in Homer’s The Odyssey, the Conclusion begins by juxtaposing the fundamentally different notions of the house as found in traditional epic narratives—the mythes fondateurs of which Édouard Glissant is so wary—and the literatures of the French Caribbean. The static, unchanging nature of Ulysses’ home, as well as the tree whose literal roots remain part of its construction, are what allow him to reclaim his identity and be duly recognized. Whereas the Caribbean house plays a no less integral role in the negotiation and construction of identity, the architectural and architextual analyses of previous chapters are revisited as a means of illustrating that such identity-building is, in the French Caribbean, a necessarily long and arduous process. In conclusion, the dual methodological lenses of architecture and architexture are demonstrated to be informative critical tools with which to gauge the dynamic notion of constructing identity—a near-cyclical processes of destruction and/or reassessment followed by subsequent (re)construction that, while by nature not absolute, is no less defining of a people’s perceptions and expressions of place and self.Less

Deforestation and the Yearning for Lost Landscapes in Caribbean Literatures

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert

in Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment

This chapter examines the forest as a site of multiple power struggles in the Caribbean over time. Drawing from an extensive body of Caribbean literature and history in the major language areas of ... More

This chapter examines the forest as a site of multiple power struggles in the Caribbean over time. Drawing from an extensive body of Caribbean literature and history in the major language areas of the region (Spanish, English, and French), it describes how forests in the early colonial days represented spaces of fear. It also considers how the forest and rural spaces in general have been recuperated as sites of refuge for the escaped slave and places of folk authenticity in nationalist movements. The chapter cites works, including the travel narratives of Sir Walter Raleigh and Bartolomé de Las Casas and the environmental activism of Puerto Rican poet Juan Antonio Corretjer, to discuss the ways in which forests and spaces outside the plantation complex symbolize the cultural continuities of diasporic and indigenous populations in the Caribbean.Less

Francophone Island Cultures: Comparing Discourses of Identity in ‘Is-land’ Literatures

Pascale De Souza

in Postcolonial Thought in the French-speaking World

The contribution of island cultures to postcolonial debate has received little attention from scholars. While Caribbean literature and authors have generated much interest, literature from the ... More

The contribution of island cultures to postcolonial debate has received little attention from scholars. While Caribbean literature and authors have generated much interest, literature from the Mascarenes and the South Pacific remains largely ignored not only in Francophone research conducted in Europe or North America but also in Anglophone postcolonial discussions of regional identity. In Une tempête (1969), Aimé Césaire provides a narrative that allows the island to emerge as a locale where identity, place, and being in time can overlap. Such a quest for alternative discourses is echoed in the search for a dialogue between the Caribbean, the Mascarenes, and the South Pacific. This chapter examines the cultures of Francophone islands, compares discourses of identity in ‘is-land’ literature, and also discusses the three concepts of négritude, créolité, and Indianité.Less

Conclusion: The Missing People: Theorizing Haitian and Caribbean Exiles

in Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature: Alexis, Depestre, Ollivier, Laferriere, Danticat

This chapter addresses the question of how Haitian exiles analyzed in this book relate to other contemporary narratives and theories of exile, both from the Caribbean and from the wider world. It ... More

This chapter addresses the question of how Haitian exiles analyzed in this book relate to other contemporary narratives and theories of exile, both from the Caribbean and from the wider world. It discusses exile in European and North American theory followed by exile in Caribbean literature and theory. It argues that the various literary, political, philosophical and cultural changes in post-1946 Haitian writing that this book has analyzed can in many ways be traced back, and read as a counterpoint to the ideas and suppositions of Roumain's Gouverneurs de la rosée. In particular, that text places primary emphasis on ‘the people’, a collectivity seen as somehow inherent, divided for sure, but recoverable and always unquestionably there, immanent, at home. Haitian writing of the mid-twentieth century had a strong sense of the people, what they were, and how they should be represented. In literally grounding his work in the experience of the people, Roumain suggests strongly that it is from and in the people that Haitian literature will be invented, born, or, indeed, reborn.Less