Glancing backwards: George Lamming, John Cowper Powys and vexed visions of labour in the capitalist world-ecology

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article offers a comparative analysis of the literary registration of the reorganisation of labour regimes at moments of ecological revolution in the work of the Barbadian author George Lamming and the English novelist John Cowper Powys. Its focus is the way in which the two novels engage with the socio-ecological upheavals of the period of the Great Slump in 1930s, and the differently inflected modernist aesthetics through which they articulate transformations in landscapes, labour and psychic structures. Drawing its theoretical co-ordinates from Jason W. Moore’s concept of world-ecology, the article examines how In the Castle of My Skin registers the crisis in the sugar frontier in the early twentieth century. Through the optic of world-ecology, a connection can be made between these transformations in the Caribbean as articulated by Lamming and contemporaneous transformations in the English landscape, registered in the limestone industry in Powys’s novel Weymouth Sands. Such transformations produced structurally alike – if substantively different – contested visions of rural labour in both locations.