Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere: From the Plantation to the Postcolonial

316 Pages·2011·3.041 MB·English

by  Raphael Dalleo

Caribbean Literature
and the Public Sphere
New World Studies
J. Michael Dash, Editor
Frank Moya Pons and
Sandra Pouchet Paquet,
Associate Editors
Caribbean Literature
and the Public Sphere
From the Plantation
to the Postcolonial
Raphael Dalleo
University of Virginia Press
Charlottesville and London
University of Virginia Press
© 2011 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
First published 2011
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dalleo, Raphael.
Caribbean literature and the public sphere : from the plantation to the
postcolonial / Raphael Dalleo.
p. cm. — (New world studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8139-3198-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8139-3199-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8139-3202-6 (e-book)
1. Caribbean literature—History and criticism. 2. Postcolonialism—
Caribbean Area. 3. Politics and literature—Caribbean Area. 4. Caribbean
Area—Intellectual life. 5. Public opinion—Caribbean Area. I. Title.
PN849.C3D35 2011
809'.89729—dc23
2011022865
A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative
publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers
University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia
Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org.
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction: Periodizing the Public Sphere 1
Part One: The Rise of the Caribbean Literary
Public Sphere, 1804 to 1886
1 The Abolitionist Public Sphere
and the Republic of the Lettered 21
2 The Public Sphere Unbound: Michel Maxwell Philip,
El laúd del desterrado, and Mary Seacole 44
Part Two: Modern Colonialism and the Anticolonial
Public Sphere, 1886 to 1959
3 The Intellectual and the Man of Action: Resolving
Literary Anxiety in the Work of José Martí,
Stephen Cobham, and Jacques Roumain 69
4 The Ideology of the Literary: Claude McKay’s
Banana Bottom and the Little Magazines
of the 1940s 96
Part Three: Postcoloniality and the Crisis of the
Literary Public Sphere, 1959 to 1983
5 The Expulsion from the Public Sphere:
The Novels of Marie Chauvet 125
vi Contents
6 Anticolonial Authority and the Postcolonial
Occasion for Speaking: George Lamming
and Martin Carter 152
7 The Testimonial Impulse: Miguel Barnet
and the Sistren Theatre Collective 175
8 Cultural Studies and the Commodified Public:
Luis Rafael Sánchez’s La guaracha del Macho
Camacho and Earl Lovelace’s The Dragon
Can’t Dance 199
Conclusion: The Postcolonial Public Sphere 225
Notes 241
Works Cited 269
Index 289
Preface
Periodization is an activity fraught with pitfalls, and
the Caribbean context—with its multiple histories and temporalities—
presents special challenges. My introduction addresses specific concerns
that arise in periodizing comparatively across national and linguis-
tic boundaries and traditions. Before asking how Caribbean literature
might be periodized, however, it is worth asking if this endeavor is even
worth attempting. Peter Hulme describes “historical periodization” as
one of “the most resistant categories of Eurocentrism” (“Beyond the
Straits” 42), because of its tendency to narrate world history via stages in
European development as well as its reintroduction of the modernist tele-
ology that drove Enlightenment and colonization alike. Alison Donnell’s
Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature has mounted a powerful cri-
tique of attempts to construct a progressive narrative of Caribbean liter-
ary history. Donnell seeks to emphasize how “all histories and traditions
are based on acts of selection, exclusion and preference” (4). Calling
attention to canon building as an ideological process allows Donnell to
deconstruct the present canon of Caribbean writing as the product of
choices and selections made in the 1960s and 1970s that still exert influ-
ence on understandings of the field. The account of Caribbean literary
history that develops from this moment, Donnell shows, became canon-
ized because it resonated forcefully in the field’s “nationalist moment of
canon making” (42). I want to keep in mind Hulme’s warning about the
temptations of seeing history as a series of progressive stages, as well as
Donnell’s insight that every reconstruction of literary history is a story
about the past informed by the present.
As much as Donnell’s critique calls into question the kind of peri-
odizing moves I am interested in making, her destabilizing of existing
understandings of the Caribbean canon also opens up possibilities for
viii Preface
telling different stories about the literary past like the one I tell in Ca-
ribbean Literature and the Public Sphere. Donnell’s work makes visible
how writers from the 1960s and 1970s like George Lamming and Ka-
mau Brathwaite were able to project their own experiences and desires
as the unifying logic of Caribbean writing in general. Donnell focuses
especially on the teleological rise of nationalism in Caribbean literature,
from its “awakening” in the 1930s to its full-blown emergence in the
post–World War II era, as the most compelling of these stories. There
are a number of other assumptions about the essential truth of Carib-
bean literature that come from the powerful histories constructed by
what Donnell describes as the nationalist generation, few as enduring as
the idea of “exile” as an organizing logic for Caribbean literature. Don-
nell’s intervention clears space for an investigation like mine, where ex-
ile is viewed not as a transcendental trope of Caribbean experience but
rather the reflection of a specific historical moment in the region’s liter-
ary history: in the second half of this project, I argue for understanding
this focus on exile as a product of the uncertainty about the social place
of the writer brought about by the end of the modern colonial public
sphere. Once these sorts of paradigms and critical assumptions are seen
to be historical, the potential for looking at writers in a more dialectical
relationship with society becomes possible.
Donnell’s ability to call into question received tellings of Caribbean
literary history comes in large part from her openness to the archive: as
she puts it, “in order to deliver us to . . . the ‘real’ beginning of West In-
dian writing, these studies [by the nationalist generation] cut a narrow
pathway through what I want to argue was a complex and densely pop-
ulated literary scene” (42). Michael Dash points to a similar dynamic in
Francophone literary history, where “the movements of the 1930s saw
themselves as the beginning of Caribbean writing,” and therefore “any
effort at a periodization of francophone Caribbean writing must face
head on the received ideas that have become entrenched about the ori-
gins of ‘authentic’ or ‘true’ Caribbean writing” (Dash, Introduction to
Literary Genres 407). The 1930s functions as a myth of origins through-
out the region by combining major events in anticolonial politics, such
as the labor unrest in Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, Jacques Rou-
main’s founding of Parti Communiste Haïtien in 1934, or the arrest of
Pedro Albizu Campos in Puerto Rico in 1936, with literary events like
the publication of Claude McKay’s Banana Bottom in 1933 and the re-
turn of Aimé Césaire to Martinique in 1939.
My project seeks to resituate these events not as origins but as part of
ix Preface
a moment of anticolonial consolidation made possible by a specific rela-
tionship between literature and the public sphere. In successfully craft-
ing a heroic public role for the writer, these anticolonial men have made
convenient founding fathers. But a wealth of new archival work has ap-
peared in the past few decades to show just how much literary work
from before this period exists. Moira Ferguson’s 1987 reissue of the slave
narrative The History of Mary Prince and her 1993 collection of writ-
ings by the Hart sisters sparked a veritable boom in republication of lit-
erary texts from the early British colonies. Nonfiction work from Ja-
maica followed, like Mary Seacole’s 1857 Wonderful Adventures, re-
published in 1988, and Diana Paton’s 2001 publication of A Narrative
of Events, since the First of August, 1834, by James Williams. The pres-
ence of a number of early novels from Trinidad has especially changed
the literary landscape, beginning with Selwyn Cudjoe’s edited version of
the 1854 novel Emmanuel Appadocca by Michel Maxwell Philip pub-
lished in 1997 and continuing with a series of early Trinidadian novels,
including Warner Arundell, Adolphus, The Slave Son, and Rupert Gray,
all originally published between 1838 and 1907 and reissued from 2001
to 2006. Claims that Caribbean literature is a twentieth-century phe-
nomenon can no longer be made in the face of this new material.
Along with these newly available texts, other forms of archival work
have shed light on the range of this early writing. The opening up of the
archive has shown the transnational routes that enmeshed the Franco-
phone and Hispanophone Caribbean during the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, in texts like Julio Ramos’s Divergent Modernities,
Kirsten Silva Gruesz’s Ambassadors of Culture, Brent Hayes Edwards’s
The Practice of Diaspora, Anna Brickhouse’s Transamerican Literary
Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere, Rodrigo Lazo’s
Writing to Cuba, and Laura Lomas’s Translating Empire. New histo-
ries of the diverse forms of writing to emerge in the English colonies
in this period have been assembled in Faith Smith’s Creole Recitations,
Cudjoe’s Beyond Boundaries, Evelyn O’Callaghan’s Women Writing the
West Indies, 1804–1939, Leah Rosenberg’s Nationalism and the For-
mation of Caribbean Literature, and Belinda Edmondson’s Caribbean
Middlebrow. Taken together, these new approaches to the archive make
it possible to reconceptualize the literary history of the entire region.1
In attempting to tell my own story about Caribbean literature, to pe-
riodize it, and to draw broad conclusions about different moments in
its development, I want to remain aware that overgeneralizing, leaving
things out, and silencing are part of all literary history. But just as I do