Mapping the Lived–Imagined Caribbean: Postcolonial Geographies in the Literature of the ‘Diasporic’ Caribbean

Abstract

The present paper is part of a larger project that intends both to bridge some of the existing gaps in the fields of postcolonial studies and geography, and to explore potential avenues for interdisciplinary research. It will do so through the study of selected writings of five contemporary Caribbean authors living in the USA. At the core of my project is an analysis of how these novels map the Caribbean ‘otherwise’, both through the language and the imaginaries they produce and through their function as cultural products circulating and being consumed in transnational cultural markets. The literary geography produced by these novels is timely, as it attempts to reveal the impact in the Caribbean region of three important concepts that have increasingly been debated in Humanities scholarship in recent decades: ‘hybridity’, ‘diaspora’ and ‘authenticity’. The paper will investigate how these concepts fail to recognise and address the complexities of its space and will explore the ways in which this literature challenges the imaginaries around the above concepts by mapping of the Caribbean as ‘lived–imagined’ space. Such mapping, I contend, demonstrates the urgent need for academic research – especially in geography and postcolonial theory – to honour the contribution of literary imagination in envisioning links between how a place is imagined, represented and lived, in suggesting new ways of looking at and across places that count as historically ‘marginal’ and geographically ‘invisible’, and thus producing knowledge and culture ‘otherwise’.