Black Laughter

Abstract

Under two centuries of contempt and neglect lies a rich deposit of eighteenthand nineteenth-century Jamaican literature. Much of it is an expression of folk culture and is therefore to be assessed quite separately from written material otherwise encountered. All of it survives through the agency of European literary conventions, and some is almost purely in this tradition. In other cases there is a fragile English framework for the expression of a Black creole consciousness, and the whole structure is steeped through and through in the Jamaican oral tradition. This period of Jamaican literature is largely unknown because of its inaccessibility. Isolated and often crumbling copies of novels, journals, and accounts of domestic manners by White writers are to be found in specialized collections and rare-book rooms rather than in general libraries and bookstores; but the work of collection is underway and a representative selection of this literature will shortly be available.' For this article, it is enough to say that among and often within full-length publications by White writers are songs, tales, anecdotes, and letters by Jamaican Blacks. Much of what survives in the form of Annancy tales, for example, has its own structural integrity, but a great deal else is buried in the midst of a European medium so that a certain dualism exists in literary structure and content. These literary survivals are in part the heritage of eighteenth-century English literature, which reflects a rising interest in folklore and ethnography, a trend that gathers momentum in the nineteenth century and materializes in romantic