"England was simply a world": George Lamming's The Emigrants as Cultural Decolonization

Abstract

Abstract: While the significance of George Lamming's second novel The Emigrants (1954) as a ground-breaking work of Black British literature is widely acknowledged, my essay re-examines the novel as a serious exploration of the possibility of cultural decolonization for West Indians. In particular, I consider the implications of the psychological turmoil of some characters after their arrival in England, as well as the connections between the different phases of their emigration. The emigrants' voyage destabilizes their worldview and allows them to start forming a West Indian identity, which Lamming deems a crucial starting point for cultural decolonization. Yet their collective psychological strain, which partly results from their shocking encounter with racism in England, reveals that internalized colonial values still deeply condition their mindsets and obstruct further development of cultural decolonization. The novel's ending, however, subtly points to the emergence of a new solidarity based on a clearer understanding of the cultural conditioning in question. In highlighting both a certain degree of liberation of the mind and the enormous difficulty in achieving it, The Emigrants elaborates a torturous yet crucial stage of cultural decolonization.