Making Men: Gender, Literary Authority, and Women's Writing in Caribbean Narrative (review)

Abstract

This rich account of twentieth-century Caribbean narrative in the anglophone context begins by framing an earlier canon of (mostly) male writers--George Lamming, V. S. Naipaul, C. L. R. James--in terms of the idealized Victorian gentleman-scholar who, claims Belinda Edmondson, provides them with a model of literary and intellectual authority. Edmondson demonstrates this with an incisive analysis of the discursive feminization of the Caribbean vis-à-vis Europe, the feminization of the nonwhite Caribbean male in particular, relative to both the nonwhite Caribbean woman and the European man, and the ways in which anxieties about these gendered constructions produce particular readings of revolution, the "folk," and nationalism. Given the us/(Afro- or Indo-Caribbean)/insider vs. them/(English)/outsider approach that structures so many discussions of the Caribbean, such that the colonial presence is structured as essentially and always other, a presence to be excised in the process of recovering some pure essence, this study's attempts to sort out Caribbean narrative in terms of a Victorian model will undoubtedly elicit groans and accusations of Eurocentricity.