Transcolonial Bildung: George Lamming, Social Death, and Actually Existing Modernism

Abstract

This article begins by situating the semi-autobiographical narrator of George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin amid modernist representations of child philosophers at the imperial ‘periphery’ and in relation to the figure of the ‘scholarship boy’ elaborated by Richard Hoggart. It then examines the relation between modernism and exile in Lamming's writing in light of recent work on how Lamming's rise as an author was facilitated by a contest between modernism and rival modes in mid-century British literary life. It further shows that in Castle and related writings, Lamming sets up an opposition in which the scholarship boy, the Caribbean middle classes, British culture, and contempt for blackness appear on the other side of a divide of death from the philosophizing child, the Caribbean peasant, non-British culture, and blackness. It concludes by arguing that Lamming's rendering of this opposition exemplifies how fictions of decolonization could extend and modify the paradigm of thwarted bildung whose centrality to modernist fictions of empire has been illuminated by Jed Esty.