The Material Imperialism of the Home in Paule Marshall’s The Chosen Place, The Timeless People

Abstract

Summary“The Material Imperialism of the Home” in Paule Marshall’s The Chosen Place, The Timeless People argues that in the fictional Caribbean country Bourne Island, where this novel about post-World War II development is set, home is understood as a conflicted site of technological and material structures left over from slavery and colonialism. It further focuses on the novel’s narration of how global transformations in the economy and the development of new technological ideologies that were connected to histories of slavery and processes of racialisation emerged not just in imperial centres, but also in the quotidian places of the Caribbean home. The first part of the article considers the different ways that the “Timeless People” and protagonist Merle Kinbona experience home as an entanglement with the colonial and slave past, and how this condition affects their potential futures. The second half of the article looks at the novel’s treatment of cybernetic and information technologies through the character of white anthropologist Allen Fuso and how his efforts to resist becoming a United States-based domestic, heteronormative, “IBM Machine” are related to histories of racial oppression, technology, imperialism, and new forms of value extraction.