Views and Visions: layered landscapes in West Indian migrant narratives

Abstract

This panel focuses on the crucial importance of migration and remigration to/from the Caribbean and its diaspora centres. My paper is an exploration of how visual and written narratives can be read within this context. Specifically, I want to survey a sample of nineteenth and early twentieth century constructions of the colonial West Indies by women (travelogues, journals, fictions) and if possible, compare these accounts with contemporary visual representations, particularly of landscape, in order to demonstrate how enduring is the strategy of overlaying features of the familiar, memories of (European) home, onto the topography of the (tropical) new. Often, the tropical ‘home’ resists this ‘translation’ and points to the postcolonial space as one which is best read via a peculiar kind of double vision which yokes together disparate cultures; a vision still apparent in West Indian writing today from Naipaul to Kincaid.