Reinscribing St. Kitts’s History: Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge and the Plantation as Crucible

Abstract

In an essay called “‘Sugar Realism’ in Caribbean Fiction,” Joe Lockard writes that “sugar cane cultivation was the original sin that demanded the enslavement and importation of Africans to the Caribbean islands, and in these narratives it continues as a near-unredeemable source of social degradation” (16). While the first sugar plantations using African slave labor were developed by Portugal in Madeira, St. Kitts, named “St. Christopher’s” by Christopher Columbus, was settled by the British and then the French in 1823–24; known as “The Mother Colony,” it ceased sugar production in 2005. Today it is part of the two-island nation St. Kitts and Nevis, famous for their exclusive plantation inns that reinscribe for tourists the great houses and sugar factories of the eighteenth century, whose ruined windmills and old coppers dot many Caribbean islands today. This chapter focuses on Caryl Phillips’s novel Cambridge (1991), set in a thinly fictionalized version of St. Kitts in the period between the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and the end of slavery in 1834–38. I read the novel as a deeply ironic reinscription of narrative genres available to us from the era of plantation slavery, a reinscription that demonstrates the instability, incompleteness, and erasures of the historical record.KeywordsGreat HouseSlave TradeSugar PlantationPlantation SocietyColonial DiscourseThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.