West Indian Experience Research Articles

Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism, by Christopher Taylor

Reviewed by: Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism by Christopher Taylor Theodore Koditschek (bio) Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism, by Christopher Taylor; pp. xi + 307. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018, $104.95, $27.95 paper, £80.00, £20.99 paper. In a world dominated by the competitive logic of free trade, what happens to those groups and places whose diminished profitability consigns them to feelings of abandonment and neglect? Christopher Taylor's Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism gives that question a hefty dose of historical depth. In the eighteenth century, the West Indian sugar colonies had been considered the crown jewel of Britain's mercantilist Empire. Yet, during the nineteenth century, their status radically changed. As slavery was anathematized, and the plantations grew less remunerative, celebrations of success were replaced by anguished handwringing. Once cheaper sources of sugar became available from Brazil and Cuba where (after British emancipation) slavery remained in place, Britain's West Indian colonies increasingly were perceived as embarrassments by a metropolitan public whose attention was turning in other directions. Taylor's interest, however, is in the responses of people in the Caribbean Isles. Taylor begins with Adam Smith and later political economists, whom he portrays as having ushered in the ascendancy of a calculus of self-interest to mainstream metropolitan behavior and thought. Profitable colonies ought to become independent, while unprofitable ones were not worth keeping. In the West Indies, this was perceived as a betrayal of the social contract under which the empire had been forged. In the anonymously published novel Marly (1828) and a series of other texts, the planters offered an alternative vision of plantation protection and social interconnection that drew on nostalgic representations of the mercantilist epoch. But if a social contract could be invoked by the oppressors, it could be refigured by the oppressed in a more compelling way. In chapter 2, Taylor focuses on the loss of protection that emancipation brought to black West Indians exploited under the system of apprenticeship and then left in an unfavorable labor market once the process of emancipation was complete. Through a reading of James Williams's Narrative of Events (1837), Taylor shows how black working people experienced the state of worthlessness to which they were thus consigned. Taylor next traces the mid-century vicissitudes of a planter, Matthew Higgins, who wrapped his demand for a return to protection in the moralizing veneer of defending the freedman. He juxtaposes this against the work of a mixed-race Trinidadian, Michel Philip, whose white father's abandonment inspired novelistic fantasies of revenge. In chapter 4, Taylor follows the career of George Des Sources, another mixed-race Trinidadian, whose disappointment at the refusal of British imperial citizenship motivated him to turn to Hispanic Venezuela, where he induced a group of British West Indian emigrants to establish a utopian socialist colony. Finally, Taylor turns to Mary Seacole, a Jamaican hotelier and nurse who eventually traveled to England and Crimea. There, she applied a nurturant sensibility first cultivated in the West Indies. Because Taylor is a literary scholar, he close reads a wide variety of texts, with the ostensible aim of showing how West Indian literature "emerged as a genre and epistemological alternative to political economy" (9). Yet this book also takes on a less explicit (but far more ambitious) agenda that seeks to reinterpret the entire nineteenth-century West Indian experience though the lens of its inhabitants' perceptions of neglect. Taylor [End Page 331] is an extraordinarily observant reader and intelligent commentator, and he offers gems of insight (occasionally encased in academic jargon) on almost every page. Moreover, he has read widely, including in the vast corpus of books and articles that historians have produced. Nevertheless, he has missed a few significant interventions, and his methodological orientation toward textual exegesis sometimes sends him in one-sided, even doctrinaire directions that a more comprehensive approach to the evidence might have forestalled. Is it really fair to say that the West Indies were neglected by British metropolitans during the nineteenth century? Taylor is far too knowledgeable and sophisticated to make...

Migrant Modernism: Postwar London and the West Indian Novel by J. Dillon Brown (review)

BROWN, J. DILLON. Migrant Modernism: Postwar London and the West Indian Novel. Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 2013. 246 pp. $27.00. J. Dillon Brown's Migrant Modernism calls for a re-reading of four West Indian writers of the Windrush generation whose complex relationships to both Caribbean and British literary culture are often overlooked or misread. As part of the first wave of Caribbean migrants sailing on the S.S. Empire Windrush, to fill post-WWII labor shortages in the mother country, Guyanese Edgar Mittelholzer, Barbadian George Lamming, Trinidadian Samuel Selvon, and Jamaican Richard Mais are among those considered to be the founding fathers of a distinct West Indian canon, who published during a time when the Anglophone Caribbean was still made up of British colonies, and whose arrival intensified the perceived crisis of postwar Englishness (22). Though London offered opportunities for publication, critics voiced their disapproval when Caribbean literature failed to meet British expectations for tropical tales of cultural transparency or Caribbean expectations of freeing themselves from the yoke of colonialism. Brown's book illustrates for these early West Indian authors, modernism was not, as postcolonial criticism sometimes assumes, merely an alien literary force to be rejected, but a potentially liberatory aesthetic with strategically useful cultural connotations (7). In a time when England was trying to reestablish a stability of national identity and the superiority of its literary forms, these migrant writers employed modernism to challenge British assumptions and commercial demands for tropical flavor, transparency, and apolitical, anthropological vignettes of life in the third world. Migrant Modernism argues that the experimental, diverse, often dense, and thereby challenging literature of Selvon, Mittelholzer, Lamming, and Mais demonstrates both the writers' literary inheritance and distinct appropriation of modernism, from mimicking a dying British tradition to expressing a living West Indian experience. The book is divided into five chapters, the first laying the historical foundation to understand the literary environment at the time and the modes of reading that have elided the view of the migrant writers' repurposing of modernism. Thereafter, each chapter focuses on one writer and his criticism, analyzing the pressures each faced and specifically what complaints and misconceptions his work suffered: Mittelholzer's experimentalism was regarded as a lack of authentic voice, Lamming was considered too difficult and thus failed in a perceived intention to perform British high culture, Selvon was mistaken to be a simple and exotic storyteller, and while Mais's aesthetic complexity was appreciated in Britain, his political gestures were read as Eurocentric by Caribbean critics who preferred an African diasporic core to cultural independence. …

Managing the Transition to a Free Labor Society: American Interpretations of the British West Indies during the Civil War and Reconstruction

American reactions to the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865 reveal that three decades after abolition, British West Indian emancipation was still considered relevant to policy debates in the United States. The early 1860s saw a significant shift in northern views of the British Caribbean colonies, in particular as a result of the writings of William G. Sewell on the subject. For Republicans, escalating social conflict in Jamaica highlighted above all the need to prevent former slaveholders from monopolizing political power after emancipation, and this interpretation of the West Indian experience reinforced the evolving case for equal rights. Many had argued that former slaves’ economic independence had been the major cause of declining plantation production in the West Indies. However, Republicans tended to accept representations of black farmers in the Caribbean as an incipient middle class, and never concluded from the British case that access to land for freed slaves would be fundamentally at odds with maintaining future cotton production.

Black Nationalism in the New World: Reading the African-American and West Indian Experience (review)

Reviewed by: Black Nationalism in the New World: Reading the African-American and West Indian Experience Michelle Stephens Robert Carr. Black Nationalism in the New World: Reading the African-American and West Indian Experience. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. xiv + 368 pp. Robert Carr's introduction to Black Nationalism in the New World opens with a quote from George Lamming: "How you come to think of where you are, and how you come to think of your relation to where you are: this is very dependent on the character and the location of power as it exists where you are." The epigraph is apt for it captures two of the central themes of Carr's work—how geographical relationships of power have shaped the politics and the history of the New World and how black subjects have located themselves within those geographies of power. In his unearthing of texts that cross both disciplinary and territorial boundaries—from African American Martin Delany's novel Blake to the dramatic performances of the Caribbean theatre collective Sistren—Carr's transnational, comparative study offers new models of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural analysis for both African American and Caribbean studies. The epistemological stakes of Black Nationalism in the New World run deeper than interdisciplinarity, however. Carr's scholarship can be located within an intellectual formation recently identified by the Latin Americanist theorist Walter Mignolo as the site of "an other thinking." In his description of the peculiar condition of the intellectual in the once-colonial world, Mignolo points out, "parallel to 'underdeveloped societies' there are 'silenced societies' . . . in which talking and writing take place but which are not heard in the planetary production of knowledge." This intellectual colonial world is limited by the lack of global recognition that it too has the capacity to "theorize" power, with insights unique to geographical location. Lamming's opening quote is doubly fitting, then, because it also provides a commentary on Carr's own subject position as a lecturer at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. A scholar of black nationalisms located geographically and politically in (what was once [End Page 481] known as) the Caribbean "periphery," one of Carr's strongest interventions is to theorize and thereby place Caribbean and New World black nationalisms at the center of the global study of nationalism. In this respect, Black Nationalism can be seen as a response to two intellectual formations based very much in the "First World." One is the study of nationalism as shaped by Benedict Anderson's well-known formulation of the nation as an "imagined community." In his attempt to define Caribbean and black nationalisms in relationship to this scholarly discourse, Carr asks very different questions, for example, notonly how nationalism constructs the nation, but also how (black) nationalisms construct the world. His study traces the ways in which black subjects have been forced to construct and reconstruct their world, both locally and globally, in order to locate themselves as cultural and (geo)political actors. Carr's work suggests that by paying closer attention to these scarcely studied national formations, we may be forced to revise some of our most basic theoretical assumptions about the path, progress, and development of nationalism as a global phenomenon. Carr's work also responds to the even more recent turn in African American studies toward notions of diaspora. In this latter instance, a figure such as Paul Gilroy becomes Carr's central interlocutor, as he asserts, "I differ from Gilroy's project of offering a black Atlantic paradigm. . . . Before [the African diaspora] can begin to talk about our commonalities we first have to understand the nature of our differences." Here Carr adopts too polarized a stance in relationship to Gilroy's work, almost seeming to position Black Nationalism in opposition to a text such as The Black Atlantic, as its Caribbean shadow. Instead, the central value of Carr's text remains precisely in what is implied in his subtitle: that by "reading African American and West Indian experiences" together, we are listening to a dialogue among a new generation of Caribbean and African-descended intellectuals, who form part of a larger formation of New World black intellectuals. In spite of...

Black nationalism in the new world: reading the African-American and West Indian experience

Black nationalism in the new world: reading the African-American and West Indian experience

Les espaces de la diaspora antillaise au Royaume-Uni. Limites des concepts socioanthropologiques

Aspects of the West Indian diaspora The West Indian diaspora in the United Kingdom is composed of a diversity of social configurations. Affiliations with different communities help to create a patchwork that challenges unitary or dualistic notions. The Pentecostal network is an example of the multiracial and multicultural West Indian experience. The idea of diaspora therefore needs to be rethought.

Creole in Literature: Beyond Verisimilitude: Texture and Varieties: Derek Walcott

The crucial question for the politicians of Creole and West African Pidgin, and for all nationalist monolinguists, is whether it is really worth giving up variety (and what ordinary people, let alone a genius, can do with it) for a certain kind of political and cultural uniformity, sometimes called purity. Is this search for uniformity more relevant to closed, intimate forest societies, than to, say, present day Africa, and the multi-ethnic West Indies? And does this insistence on one variety of a community's speech show an ignorance of language and its uses, especially of its non-semantic aspects? Living and working in Africa strengthened my long standing intuitive doubt about the doctrine of one language, one culture, one political unit; and of course one language per person, a la English xenophobia. Wole Soyinka's Ake seems to me strong evidence against monolingualism and against monoculturalism. As Carlos Fuentes put it in his BBC broadcasts, 'Monolingualism is a curable disease'. And so would be monodialectism. More importantly it would remove the rich possibilities for texture and foregrounding in literature, or even in general conversation and story telling. Further evidence, to put it negatively, of the lack of need for monolingualism in the makers of fiction might come from such people as Ford Madox Ford, Nabakov, Manzoini, Beckett not to mention old stalwarts such as Chaucer, Dante, and Erasmus. And in the African context, what ofAquiano, Achebe, and Emecheta, to mention but a few? In a brief note, in my Caribbean Voices, Volume II,1 I point out how Derek Walcott, in his sonnet sequence Tales of the Islands, uses our West Indian experience of a variety of language registers to symbolize one important aspect of our living especially our sense of living on the periphery of the great world, far from metropolitan centres. The sonnet which begins 'Poopa, da' was a fete! It had free rum free whiskey' contains the now well-known lines:

The Economics of Transition to the Black Labor System in Barbados, 1630-1680

System in Barbados, I630-I680 In recent years there has been an expansion of academic interest in the nature of the transition from white indentured servitude to black slavery as the dominant labor base of the English New World colonies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Studies by Galenson, Menard, Gray and Wood, Gemery and Hogendorn, and Bean and Thomas have explained in detail this change in the labor systems of the Chesapeake area, the Carolinas, Virginia, and Maryland. In this literature, references are made to the West Indian colonies by way of comparison, but no specific studies have yet been presented for these colonies. Only Bean and Thomas attempted to be comprehensive in their comparison and showed the importance of the West Indian experience, but their analysis did not go far enough in correcting the lopsided nature of the historiography.1 All of these studies have noted that Englishmen in the West Indian colonies, particularly in Barbados during the late I64os and

Book Review: The West Indian Experience in British Schools: Multiracial education and social disadvantage in London

Book Review: The West Indian Experience in British Schools: Multiracial education and social disadvantage in London