“The people living a life every man for himself”: Problems in the Postindependence Body (Politic)

Abstract

Caribbean texts from the 1950s both articulated the promise of an independent nation-state and foreshadowed the potential problems it might encounter. This chapter explores the materialization of those problems. Focusing in particular on Wilson Harris’ The Secret Ladder (1963) and Earl Lovelace’s The Wine of Astonishment (1982), it considers how the transformations and difficulties experienced by the body politic are not only registered in these works through the image of the physical body but also shown to be connected materially to its dispositions and inculcated behaviors. The chapter argues that the crisis of political representation finds its literary corollary in a crisis of aesthetic representation, figured most notably through the malfunctioning of the topos of the tragic sacrifice.