Afterword

The afterword analyzes works by two postcolonial writers who blend anthropology and literature, Amitav Ghosh from India and Erna Brodber from Jamaica. Ghosh turns his Egyptian fieldwork into a memoir that chronicles his failure to persuade his hosts of the similarities between postcolonial India and Egypt. Ghosh’s narrator turns away from anthropology toward the written archives of a precolonial history that promises to establish the Indian Ocean connections he had sought in the postcolonial present. Brodber mixes history, ethnography, and narrative in her novel Louisiana and makes her protagonist, Ella Townsend, a postcolonial intellectual trained in anthropology at Columbia, echoing the real-life career of Zora Neale Hurston.

Culture Writing

Focusing on the 1950s and early 1960s, Culture Writing argues that the period of decolonization in Britain, the United States, France, and the Caribbean was characterized by dynamic exchanges between literary writers and anthropologists. As the British and French Empires collapsed and the United States rose to global power, and as intellectuals from the decolonizing world challenged the cultural hegemony of the West, some anthropologists began to assess their discipline’s complicity with imperialism and experimented with literary forms and techniques. The book shows that the “literary turn” in anthropology took place earlier than has conventionally been assumed, in the 1950s rather than the 1970s and 1980s. Simultaneously, some literary writers reacted to the end of modernist artistic experimentation by turning to ethnographic methods for representing the people and cultural practices of Britain, France, and the United States, bringing anthropology back home. The book discusses literary writers who had a significant professional engagement with anthropology and brought some of its techniques and research questions into literary composition: Barbara Pym (Britain), Ursula Le Guin and Saul Bellow (United States), Édouard Glissant (Martinique), and Michel Leiris (France). On the side of ethnography, there is analysis of works by anthropologists who adopted literary forms for their writing about culture: Laura Bohannan (United States), Michel Leiris and Claude Lévi-Strauss (France), and Mary Douglas (Britain). The book concludes with an afterword that shows how the literature–anthropology conversation continues into the postcolonial period in the work of the Indian author-anthropologist Amitav Ghosh and the Jamaican author-sociologist Erna Brodber.

Negotiating Tropical Desires in Social and Physical Landscapes

Chapter five offers another case study of a tourist dependent economy and local resistance to paradise discourse in Jamaica while focusing on the negotiations of what Krista Thompson describes as a “tropical landscape of desire.” This chapter examines the multifaceted approach to challenging neocolonialism and participation in “resistance culture” by Jamaican writer, activist, and scholar Erna Brodber. Brodber utilizes both creative work and cultural activism to resist exploitative consumption of the Caribbean; in the novel Myal and research project Blackspace and Educo-tourism. This chapter also considers the work of Jamaican filmmaker Esther Figueroa in her documentary Jamaica For Sale about tourism, unsustainable development, and the impact on the environment and working class Jamaicans. In comparing these two very different responses to the burden of paradise, this chapter offers an analysis of how environment and class work to complicate cultural and political activism and desire for ethical and non-exploitative relations within and through a tourism dependent economy.