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Abstract
This dissertation examines the representation of history in the Caribbean novel during the era of decolonization. Exploring the period from the 1930s to the 1970s, primarily in Trinidad, Barbados and Guyana, I argue that the predominance of historical thinking in many of the exemplary novels and works of the time was not only a response to the denial by colonialism of the history of Caribbean peoples. Such prevalence was also to be found in new class relations, which began to appear during the inaugural moment of decolonization in the 1930s when, throughout the British Caribbean, popular rebellions effectively meant the end of colonial rule. Specifically, I discuss how the confluence of a rising new middle class, growing anti-colonial thought and mass politics, and post-WWII development discourse intersected with and decisively shaped the representation of history, thereby charting the changing intellectual and aesthetic responses to the social and ideological terrain as it shifted from the time of decolonization to that of postcolonial society.
Chapter One considers the development of the barrack-yard novel in Trinidad. Examining primarily C.L.R. James’s Minty Alley, Naipaul’s Miguel Street and Earl Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance, I argue that while James reinvents the genre as a means to represent a new social subject, the working classes, and Naipaul entangles the genre with development discourse, emptying the subject of its historical agency, Lovelace uses the barrack-yard novel to scrutinize postcolonial realities and the detoured promise of decolonization. The next chapter reads the second, revised edition of The Black Jacobins, the classic work on the Haitian Revolution by C.L.R. James, as a product of his ambiguous reassessment of development discourse and renewed class conflict in the postcolonial Caribbean. The third chapter, on George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin, discusses the relationship between popular and historical consciousness in its representation of the Barbadian working classes and peasantry during the 1930s. Chapter Four explores The Guyana Quartet by Wilson Harris as a critique of the historical ideology of development discourse and as an attempt to find an alternative conception of Caribbean history located in phenomenological reality.
