Negotiating Family Models in Jamaican Literature: Class, Race, and Religion

Abstract

IntroductionFAMILIES ARE ESSENTIAL CONSTITUENTS of most societies. However, families vary so much that it is impossible to give a clear definition. This is the case because they are constructed units that are influenced by different agents or groups of agents. They define, among others, the type of partnership, role allocations, and the number of children. In a colonial context, distinct family models and their representatives frequently come into contact, since very different agents and ideas meet in this field. These encounters are aesthetically represented in literature, which negotiates family forms and explores them in fictional realities.This essay will analyse family depictions in two Jamaican texts, Tom Redcam's Becka 's Buckra Baby: Being an Episode in the Life of Noel1 (1903) and Claude McKay's Banana Bottom (1933). The two novels are set in the early 1900s and explore the colonial encounter of European and African people in post-abolition Jamaica. In doing so, they are, among other things, concerned with cultural aspects of this encounter, such as Christianity and Obeah, as well as with race and class aspects and the resulting power-relations. My analysis of the literary family constructions will show that the texts link questions of culture, race, and class through representations of families. I will furthermore argue that the texts foreground the role racialized class plays in tiie colonial situation through its tight connection to cultural issues in the texts, not only in relation to generalizing concepts of national cultures but also with respect to race and ethnicity.Cultural ExchangeTo prove my thesis statement, I want to draw on Peter Burke's concept of cultural exchange. Burke is a British historian who is mainly concerned with Renaissance social history. He analyses history in terms of the exchange of cultural goods. Applying a broad definition of culture, his micro-historical approach focuses on contact and transfer of traditions, objects, and attitudes by individual agents.2 Burke describes a number of categories which can be used for analysing the historical situation. These categories include objects that are exchanged, products that are created through the intake and fusion of the received objects, and the agents who perform this exchange. Burke concentrates on the contact that takes place between cultures which are represented by individuals or small groups. He thus uses culture in two different ways; as a more or less national, uniform category to identify the agents and as an umbrella term for the objects and products of the exchange.In his recent survey Cultural Hybridity (2009), Burke devotes a brief passage to the role that class might play in cultural exchange. Without going into too much detail, he acknowledges the importance of inter-class exchange within one culture.3 What I want to add to his theoretical framework is the consideration of class aspects not only within one cultural context but also in inter-cultural encounters. Furthermore, I will equally consider race as a category of cultural exchange because race is essential to analyse the Caribbean with its history of slavery. However, it does not feature in Burke's theory due to his European topic of research. In fact, a joint consideration of both categories, race and class, is necessary for analysing cultural exchange in the Caribbean, since race is closely connected to class in the colonial context. The US-American historian Frederick Cooper, among others, works out that global slave trade and plantation economies fostered the interlinked develop- mente of social differences in the Caribbean that can be analysed with the help of the categories of race and class.4In my analysis of cultural exchange, I will not focus on national cultures as an analytical category as suggested by Burke. Rather, I will break down what Burke calls cultures into race-, class-, and religion-specific ideologies that I take as influences on family representations. …