A Trickster’s Challenge to Rationalism

Abstract

Chapter one argues that violence is also located within discursive elements of power, wherein Western ideologies (i.e., Christianity and capitalism) maintain the sublime presence of slavery. This chapter focuses on Andrew Salkey’s A Quality of Violence and explores the suitability of realism as a novelistic mode for representing the slave sublime elements of the post-emancipation era in Jamaica, which replicates the rhetorical strategies such as the rationalistic, humanist, and onto-epistemological discourses of slavery. As the novel suggests, Christianity was the colonial tool that represented the potential for transcendence toward the ideal of freedom from the supposed irrational and superstitious world of African spirituality. Salkey depicts colonial violence as the uncanny transcripts that are adopted from the slave plantation. He attempts to move away from textuality towards the performative (music and the religious rituals of Pocomania possession that employ the body through performance to suggest the embodiment of the slave sublime), conveying the limitations of the realist novel as a genre to represent the extant nature of violence in post-emancipation Jamaica. Salkey writes within the trickster tradition, embracing the power of the Imagination through the West African trickster figure Anancy, to maintain ambiguity and to disguise his counter-hegemonic critique of rationalism.