Rum Histories: Drinking in Atlantic Literature and Culture

The book examines rum in anglophone Atlantic literature between 1945 and 1973, the period of decolonization, and explains the adaptation of these images for the era of globalization. Rum’s alcoholic nature links it to stereotypes (e.g., piracy, demon rum, Caribbean tourism) that have constrained serious analysis in the field of colonial commodities. Insights from anthropology, history, and commodity theory yield new understandings of rum’s role in containing the paradox of a postcolonial world still riddled with the legacies of colonialism. The association of rum with slavery causes slippage between its specific role in economic exploitation and moral attitudes about the consequences of drinking. These attitudes mask history that enables continued sexual, environmental, and political exploitation of Caribbean people and spaces. Gendered and racialized drinking taboos transfer blame to individuals and cultures rather than international structures, as seen in examinations of works by V. S. Naipaul, Hunter S. Thompson, Jean Rhys, and Sylvia Townsend Warner. More broadly, these stereotypes and taboos threaten understanding West Indian nationalism in works by Earl Lovelace, George Lamming, and Sylvia Wynter. The conclusion articulates the popular force of rum’s image by addressing the relationship between a meme from the "Pirates of the Caribbean" films and rhetoric during the 2016 election year.

A House for Mr Biswas and the Theory of the West Indian Novel

This chapter is about the novel form in the West Indies in the 1960s. The novel, in this period, was a key site in which debates about decolonization, originality, and cultural sovereignty took place. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas was central to this debate. It responds to a history of West Indian novels and novel theory, and became an influential text in novels, criticism, and social theory in the region. Work by George Lamming, Kamau Brathwaite, and Sylvia Wynter is discussed in detail. By tracing the changing reception of A House for Mr Biswas in the Caribbean through the 1960s, we can also trace changing ideas and priorities in Caribbean social thought.

The Void, the Distance, Elsewhere

Given the importance of literature to various forms of social cohesion, it is not surprising that the European and US empires that have dominated the geopolitical existence of the insular Caribbean have not readily invested in literary infrastructure throughout the archipelago. The impact of empire on infrastructure for the production of Caribbean literature remains underexamined at large, however. Accounting for the political and economic dimensions of the literary power produced by empire would contribute to the denaturalization of such power, and, this essay argues, decolonize the terms of literary value. The author illuminates the centrality of literary infrastructure to Caribbean literary history through a reparative critique of Pascale Casanova’s theory of the world literary marketplace in dialogue with reflections by a contemporaneous set of highly influential authors from the francophone, hispanophone, and anglophone Caribbean: Aimé Césaire, Lino Novás Calvo, George Lamming, and V. S. Naipaul.

Windrush

‘Windrush’ is a term used to describe the post-World War II generation of writers from the English-speaking Caribbean who were published (and most often lived) in Great Britain. Although generally associated with postcolonial or Caribbean literary studies, many of these writers—including authors such as Wilson Harris, George Lamming, and Samuel Selvon—were seen by their contemporaries as inheritors of the tradition of modernism. Adapting the formally experimental tendencies of pre-war modernism to anti-colonial critique, members of the Windrush generation were widely celebrated in the British literary world as a vibrant new group of writers along the lines of James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. Pioneering figures in the emergence of Anglophone Caribbean literature, they also represent a lesser-known strain of late modernism, one that seized on the unruly, oppositional, and utopian energies characteristic of modernist writing and focused them more firmly on issues of race, ethnicity, and empire.

Selvon, Samuel (1923–1994)

Samuel Selvon was a Trinidadian writer whose vivid portraits of daily life in both the Caribbean and post-Second World War England garnered international acclaim. Selvon’s episodic storytelling, vernacular narration, and stylistic inventiveness have led critics past and present to classify his writing alongside both his modernist predecessors, and his postcolonial contemporaries. Selvon was born in Trinidad in 1923 to an East Indian father and an Anglo-Scottish mother. In his own words, he grew up as a ‘Creolized West Indian’. He worked as a wireless operator for the Royal Naval Reserve during the Second World. After the war ended in 1945, Selvon relocated to Port of Spain and began his early forays into journalism, contributing to The Trinidad Guardian and serving as the fiction editor for The Guardian Weekly. Selvon’s early stories and sketches, now collected in Foreday Morning, demonstrate his early preoccupation with the details of everyday life, a preoccupation that cuts across his writings. In 1950, somewhat disenchanted with what he called the ‘very complacent and easy going’ Trinidadian life, Selvon migrated to England on a boat that also carried the Barbadian novelist George Lamming.