The Caribbean Novel since 1945: Cultural Practice, Form, and the Nation-State

Caribbean Studies Series

Anton L. Allahar and Shona N. Jackson

Series Editors

The Caribbean Novel since 1945: Cultural Practice, Form, and the Nation-State

Michael Niblett

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

Copyright © 2012 by University Press of Mississippi

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Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2012

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Niblett, Michael.

  The caribbean novel since 1945 : cultural practice, form, and the nation-state / Michael Niblett.

      p. cm. — (Caribbean studies series)

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-61703-247-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61703-248-6 (ebook) 1. Caribbean fiction—History and criticism. 2. Postmodernism in literature. 3. Caribbean Area—Civilization. I. Title.

PN849.C3N53 2012

809.3’99729—dc23                               2011026498

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Cultural Practice, Creolization, and the Nation-State

1. The Promise of National Independence: Modernity, Allegory, and Sacrifice

2. The people living a life every man for himself: Problems in the Postinde-pendence Body (Politic)

3. Literary Deliriums: Cultural Expression, Commodity Fetishism, and the Search for Community

4. From Breakdown to Rebirth: Ritual Reconfigurations of the Nation-State

5. No Pain like This Body: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in a Time of Crisis

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank David Dabydeen for all his help and support over the years. He has been a fantastic supervisor, colleague, and friend, generous with his time and a pleasure to know. Many thanks to John Thieme and John Gilmore, who read and commented on large sections of this work. Thanks, likewise, to Neil Lazarus, who commented on an earlier version of parts of the book. I am indebted to the University Press of Mississippi and, in particular, Craig Gill and Walter Biggins. Many thanks to the anonymous reviewer who provided a range of insightful comments on the manuscript, and to Bill Henry for his careful and astute reading of the work. I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which funded my studies. I owe a debt of thanks to the Centre for Caribbean Studies and the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick. Many thanks to Lynn Guyver, in particular, and to Kerry Drakeley, Maureen Tustin, and Caroline Parker for all the help they have given me. I am grateful to all the people I’ve had the chance to hang around with while working on this book. Kerstin Oloff and Sharae Deckard have been great friends, sometime flatmates, and a source of intellectual inspiration. Equally, it has been top quality to know and work with Jim Graham, Claire Westall, Teresa Bailach, and Chris Campbell. Likewise, many thanks to Steve Barrell and Torri Wang for walks, bears, mycology, and TV. Thanks to Mark, Rochelle, and Simon in Leamington, to Emma and John, and warm thanks to Tijana Nikolic. Many thanks to my parents, my family, and Jack and Fen for all that they have done for me.

Parts of chapter 4 previously appeared as "Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Caribbean Literary Field: Crossing Boundaries in Erna Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home," Caribbean Review of Gender Studies 2 (May 2008). Parts of the introduction and chapter 3 previously appeared, in different form, as The Manioc and the Made-in-France: Reconsidering Creolization and Commodity Fetishism in Caribbean Literature and Theory, in Breaking Ground: Readings in Caribbean History and Culture, ed. D. A. Dunkley (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2011).

The Caribbean Novel since 1945

Introduction

Cultural Practice, Creolization, and the Nation-State

In January 1946, President Élie Lescot of Haiti was toppled in a revolution that, for at least some of its participants, drew its inspiration from surrealism. The visit of the surrealist writer André Breton to Port-au-Prince a month earlier had encouraged the radical student newspaper La Ruche—edited by, among others, René Dépestre and Jacques-Stéphen Alexis—to dedicate a special edition to Breton in which, galvanized by his lectures, they called for national insurrection.¹ The authorities promptly seized the newspaper and imprisoned the editorial team, sparking student protests and, on the back of this unrest, a general strike. The rapidity with which the strike took hold is an indication that while the La Ruche affair may have acted as something of a catalyst, a desire for change among a broad cross section of the population had been building for some time. During the U.S. occupation of Haiti between 1915 and 1934, a spirit of resistant nationalism had helped to unite Haitians across lines of color and ideology. However, the end of the occupation saw the reemergence of old tensions. When Lescot came to power in 1941, his policies only exacerbated the problem, alienating both the rural peasantry and the black urban elite. A pro-American mulâtre, he granted the U.S.-controlled Haitian-American Society for the Development of Agriculture the right to expropriate peasant land for planting rubber trees, while also waging an antisuperstition campaign against the vodun religion.² By systematically filling his administration with light-skinned individuals, moreover, he defied the convention of at least appearing to reward competence over color and antagonized the black middle classes.³ The resentment bred by these actions prompted the emergence of a general front opposed to the ruling elite, paving the way for the revolution’s success.

The overthrow of Lescot thus seemed to represent a moment of promise for Haiti: it was, as Martin Munro observes, the first instance of a successful popular revolt against a U.S.-backed regime in postwar New World politics.⁴ As such, it chimed with the prevailing democratic and anti-colonial hopes that the immediate aftermath of the [Second World War] had lit on every continent: We wanted, wrote René Dépestre, to demystify a society still shaped profoundly by a colonial heritage that the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) had not succeeded in effacing from our national life.⁵ Such sentiments make it easy to see why surrealism, with its emphasis on the disruption of reified lifeworlds, should appeal to Haiti’s radical intellectuals. Yet this is not to say that surrealist literary aesthetics simply provided an imported model for the Haitian writer to imitate (in the way that earlier poetic conventions—Parnassian verse, for example—had done). The emphasis now fell on the development of an indigenous Caribbean aesthetic, with authors seeking inspiration in radical black journals such as Légitime défense (1932) and Tropiques (1941–45), as well as in the work of writers like Jacques Roumain and Aimé Césaire (who had visited Haiti the year before Breton). To match an insurrectionary politics, an insurrectionary literary style was required.

However, the potential of the 1946 revolution quickly dissipated. Popular protest may have brought Lescot down, but it was a military junta that took control of his removal from office and installed the new president, Dumarsais Estimé, a provincial schoolteacher from the black middle class. In retrospect it is clear that the ousting of Lescot, which for the La Ruche group was to put an end to reactionary, racialized politics, ironically set the stage for the political dominance of Haiti’s noiriste factions, in particular the authentiques, who would seek to justify their leadership of the country on the grounds that their race made them the natural representatives of the Haitian people.⁶ The ultimate beneficiary of this shift in power was François Duvalier. Backed by the army, he secured the presidency in 1957, inaugurating a repressive dictatorship in which racial mystification was consistently used to obscure exploitative socioeconomic relations.

I begin with these events in Haiti because they introduce many of the issues addressed in this study: national insurrection and decolonization, the struggle for state power, ethnic chauvinism, class conflict, the relationship between rural and urban areas, and neocolonialism and imperialism. Of primary concern, however, is another issue to which the foregoing history draws attention: the relationship between national transformation and literary form. The starting point for this book on the Caribbean novel since 1945 is the postwar conjunction that Dépestre characterized as full of democratic and anti-colonial hopes.⁷ This was a period when the colonial edifice seemed to be crumbling and popular nationalist movements were emerging across the Caribbean to challenge for power. At the same time, fiction from the region was registering significant changes in style and form.⁸ We have already seen the overlap between the politics and aesthetics of liberation in Haiti. But one could just as well begin with Jamaica’s winning the right to internal self-government in 1944 and the appearance five years later of V. S. Reid’s seminal novel New Day, which, in retelling the island’s history from the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865 to the promulgation of the new constitution, pioneered the use of a modified Jamaican vernacular. Or one could take the granting of département status to Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana in 1946: seemingly holding out the promise of equality, this move was promoted by Césaire, a deputy in France’s Constituent Assembly and the author whose Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939) had earlier given lyrical expression to the revolutionary cry of negritude. Or, at a later date, expectations were again raised by the Cuban Revolution of 1959, which encouraged the return to Havana of many aspiring writers scattered throughout Europe and the United States who saw in the revolution the affirmation of all their hopes for national renewal.⁹

These examples could be said to bear out Frantz Fanon’s observation in The Wretched of the Earth that the crystallization of the national consciousness will both disrupt literary styles and themes, and also create a completely new public.¹⁰ With this in mind, this book will examine the way in which Caribbean fiction has registered and represented the nation-state, understanding the nation in its relationship to the state as, pace Michel-Rolph Trouillot, the culture and history of a class-divided civil society, as they relate to issues of state power …. [The nation] is that part of the historically derived cultural repertoire that is translated in political terms.¹¹ I emphasize the distinction between nation and state because their conflation in much of the criticism produced in the field of postcolonial studies has led in practice to a lack of consideration of state issues, and of the social dimensions of the anticolonial struggle, in favor of a more narrowly national (and national-cultural) focus, usually framed in relation to problems of identity and representation.¹² While identity and representation remain important areas of concern here, I hope that the attention to nation and state in the Caribbean context will allow for a better understanding of conflicts over modalities of social organization, as well as of the complex and variable forms that the relationship between state and nation can take.

However, of equal interest are instances where the representation of the nation runs into difficulty. This might happen because an independent nation-state is absent (as in the cases of the French départements or Puerto Rico) or because other forms of community—the diaspora, for example—are posited as the content of experience. But it might also occur because of a disjuncture between state and nation. Most commonly in the region, this has arisen when nationalist projects have failed to meet the needs and desires of the people—a dissipation of potential epitomized by the events in Haiti after 1946. As we will see, the crises suffered by such projects (and later by the nation-state itself under the pressures of neoliberal globalization) are frequently translated into crises of representation. In turn, confronted by societies struggling with new and inherited modes of oppression, Caribbean writers have sought to reshape the novel form in an effort to articulate new possibilities for social regeneration and to project original kinds of collectivities (Fanon’s completely new public).

Integral to such attempts to renarrate social experience have been other forms of cultural practice. Any endeavor to recover the histories repressed under colonialism, and to construct a Caribbean aesthetic able to integrate this past into a critical or emancipatory vision of the present, will entail consideration of such practices, since they have so often served as repositories of memory and vessels for subaltern agency. Hence do we find the Créolistes—Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant—in their now widely cited manifesto, Éloge de la créolité, arguing that "our writing must accept without reservation our popular beliefs, our magico-religious practices, our marvellous realism, the rituals tied to the ‘milan,’ to the phenomena of the ‘majò,’ to the ‘ladja’ duels, to the ‘koudmen.’"¹³ Similarly, Wilson Harris identifies cultural vestiges and practices such as limbo, vodun, Carib bush-baby omens, Arawak zemi, and Latin and English inheritances as epic stratagems available to Caribbean man in the dilemmas of history which surround him.¹⁴ Indeed, he goes on to contend that in fact the subtle key to a philosophy of history is embedded in the misunderstood arts of the Caribbean, such as limbo, vodun, and so forth.¹⁵ These practices contain within themselves a means to rethink how we might understand the region and the experiences of its peoples. In registering both the specificity of those experiences and the world-historical forces that have shaped the Caribbean, they embody a philosophy of history that is, as Harris puts it, original to us and yet capable of universal application.¹⁶

Echoing Harris, but in terms that make explicit the social imperatives at stake in this emphasis on such cultural resources, Earl Lovelace argues that the indigenous traditions of the folk—indigenous here used in such a way as to include the process of indigenization¹⁷—should be seen not merely as lower class entertainments but as enabling the establishment of the philosophical bases of our own civilization.¹⁸ Such traditions, he reiterates, must be returned to as a source of philosophy or ethics or economics; and if colonial distortion has circumscribed their meaning, as it has done with the folkloric figure of Anancy, for example (who is seen only as a scamp, a smart-man), then it is necessary to revise such bias, to conceive of Anancy not as a trickster, or ‘smart-man,’ but as a subtle philosopher tricking the individual into the recognition of the consequences of bad choices and bad faith.¹⁹ Lovelace’s perspective highlights the social or class content of these indigenous folk resources: not only do they provide the foundation for an alternative cultural identity to the historyless nonidentity imposed by the oppressor, but they do so in conjunction with a view to the total transformation of society, to its reorganization in relation to the needs of the poor and the powerless. Lovelace, moreover, goes on to emphasize the critical importance of the body to such cultural practices. A locus for the exercise of domination on the one hand, the body has been a key site of resistance on the other. Through activities such as dance and ritual, the body has been able to articulate a sense of agency and personhood otherwise denied in colonial and, often, despite independence, postcolonial contexts. I turn next to this corporeal history.

Among the Caribbean folktales collected and reworked in Raphaël Confiant’s Contes créoles des Amériques, La bête-à-sept-têtes (The Seven-Headed Beast) provides a useful illustration of the historical content embedded in such tales. When Ma Lôlô discovers one morning that the Beast has not only devoured all that she had planted in her garden (dévoré tout ce qu’elle avait planté dans son jardin) but also left in its wake a mountain of excrement, she bursts into such a fit of anger that the monster reappears and, via a magic incantation, forces her to eat its feces.²⁰ The next day, accompanied by the eldest of her three sons, Ma Lôlô returns to the garden, only for the same fate to befall them both. On the third day, she and the second son are subjected to the Beast’s vindictiveness. On the fourth day, however, she arrives with her youngest son, Ti-Pascal, whose powerful talisman causes the Beast’s heads to fall off. The monster immediately grows a new set, and a series of beheadings and reheadings ensues before Ti-Pascal finally overcomes his adversary with the help of a potion.

This tale slyly confronts and denounces the system of plantation slavery. The Beast’s destruction of Ma Lôlô’s garden and the theft of her produce figure the colonial exploitation of land and labor, its power to make her eat excrement suggesting the control exerted by the colonizer over the bodies of the colonized, and in particular the violence inflicted on the female body under slavery.²¹ Ti-Pascal’s eventual victory, however, represents the hope that a way can be found to overcome a seemingly unstoppable oppressor (although that it is Ti-Pascal who assumes the active role, while his mother remains a passive victim, indicates a problematic gendering of resistance, an issue to which I return later in this study). The tale as Confiant presents it, moreover, retains elements of performativity (songs, chants, calls to the audience) that highlight its oral provenance and draw attention to the fact that it was itself a form of opposition to the attempted regulation of corporeality by the plantation regime.

Thus the story underscores the dual character of the body as a site of both domination and resistance and emphasizes its significance to any analysis of the historical experiences of Caribbean societies. Understood as constitutively shaped by material conditions of existence and discursive practices, and differentiated along lines of sex, gender, class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality (categories that are themselves structured and restructured by the dominant mode of production), the body is central to the reproduction of social life—and, more specifically, to the reorganization of societies under capitalism and the institutionalization of colonial power relations. The economic connection between the development of Europe from the sixteenth century onward and the expropriation of resources from the New World is well established. So too is the way in which, as Marx put it, the veiled slavery of the wage-labourers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal.²² But these connections also produced and necessitated correspondences at the corporeal level.

The reprogramming of populations for life and work in the world of market capitalism entailed a reprogramming of the body. The production of the isolated individual—the monadic subject of capitalist modernity—took place against the backdrop of the increasing rationalization of society, whereby "the traditional or ‘natural’ [naturwüchsige] unities, social forms, human relations, cultural events, even religious systems, are broken up in order to be reconstructed more efficiently in the form of post-natural processes or mechanisms."²³ Across what were emerging as the core economies of Europe, this process of rationalization meant the separation of the workers from the land and their conversion into free wage laborers. Unable to immediately adapt themselves to their new condition, however, the workers were subjected to regulation designed to refit them for insertion into the new socioeconomic structures. As Marx summarizes it: The agricultural folk [were] first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded and tortured by grotesquely terroristic laws into accepting the discipline necessary for the system of wage-labour.²⁴ This remolding of the body into an isolated, productive unit of energy intensified with the expansion of the factory system. Here the division and supervision of labor, and regulation by the clock and bell, became the norm.

But these changes were crosscut, too, by a new sexual division of labor and the reorganization of gender relations. As Silvia Federici points out, the primitive accumulation on which the development of capitalist relations was premised included the subjugation of women’s labour and women’s reproductive function to the reproduction of the work-force, the construction of a new patriarchal order, based on the exclusion of women from waged-work and their subordination to men, and the mechanization of the proletarian body and its transformation, in the case of women, into a machine for the production of new workers.²⁵ In this view, we must understand gender not as a purely cultural reality but as a specification of class relations, with feminine and masculine identities coded as the carriers of specific work functions.²⁶

New modalities of thought also emerged from the reorganization of society. Capitalism’s separation of living and active humanity from the natural, inorganic conditions of their metabolic exchange with nature impacted on the structure of Enlightenment thinking.²⁷ An opposition was established between nature and culture that was to underpin a notion of progress as requiring nature’s subjugation by culture. Culture, or the human mind, which overcomes superstition, was equated with the consolidation of an abstracted, sovereign subject over and against the profusion of matter.²⁸ At the level of the individual, this schema relegated the body to the status of messy corporeality and so positioned it as needing constant regulation by the mind. Integrated also into the new sexual division of labor, the schema identified women with a degraded conception of corporeal reality and thereby construed them as inferior to men, who were viewed as more closely associated with the mind and rationality.²⁹

Such hierarchies became similarly integral to the ideological presentation of class relations. If the proletariat were to be equated with the body, a mass to be disciplined by the factory, workhouse, and prison, then the bourgeoisie were to be equated with the mind. This entailed the production of a corporeality that was likewise highly regulated, only in less oppressive and spectacular ways.³⁰ Through schooling and socialization, the middle classes were inculcated with manners, habits, and dispositions that emphasized control over the low body and its vulgar impulses: corporeality was enclosed to ensure the subject progressed beyond the blurring of nature and culture to become the rational monad of modernity—a privatised and largely passive ‘consciousness’ systematically detached from [the] world.³¹ Importantly, this form of bodily regulation enabled an appearance of self-determination by way of its naturalization in the very habits of the individual: under the auspices of an inculcated internal limit as to what constitutes rational behavior, the bourgeois subject became self-regulating.

Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice provides a particularly rewarding way of thinking about how social structures and relations of power are reproduced in and through the body. Positing a dialectical relationship between material determinants and mental schemata, Bourdieu argues that existence is shaped by the interaction between the body and a structured organization of space and time. The structures constitutive of a particular type of environment (for example, the material conditions of existence characteristic of a class condition) produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations.³² Through the habitus, the structure of which it is the product governs practice, not along the paths of mechanical determinism, but within the constraints and limits initially set on its inventions.³³ However, within these constraints resides the potential for the production of an infinite series of thoughts, perceptions, expressions, and actions, which can also feed back to—and so perpetuate or modify—the underlying structure. As the product of the history inculcated into individuals via practices shaped by objective conditions, the habitus is an incorporated history, an embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history.³⁴

Bourdieu’s theory thus draws attention once again to the body as a key site for the contestation of relations of power that would present themselves as inevitable. Moreover, while his analyses apply to social reproduction and class domination in general, much of what they uncover was more obviously visible in the context of slavery, where conditions did not allow for the indirect, impersonal domination that the system of wage labor ultimately secures.³⁵ Instead the colonizer had to rely on elementary physical violence in conjunction with explicit symbolic domination to inculcate the enslaved with a habitus attuned to the power relations of the plantation regime. Indeed, the institutional containment and regulation of the body in Europe—the reduction of the corporeal to low matter in need of subjugation by a rational mind—had its extreme and bloody underside exposed in the colonies. Here the same ideologies were rearticulated to facilitate the codification of the enslaved as uncivilized physicality and the colonizer as civilizing consciousness. Thus we have Russell McDougall’s observation that the great age of global exploration solidified into Empire at roughly the same time that [the] relocation of the body [in confinement] took place. The age of imperialism ‘completed’ the body.³⁶ In other words, the conquest of the New World’s wilderness and the taming of the colonized were to signal both the final triumph of culture over nature and the consolidation of the bourgeois sovereign subject. Bodily behavior, in fact, became something of an obsession for colonists in the Caribbean, the unseemly gestures and lascivious attitudes of the enslaved and their postemancipation descendants being a common source of concern.³⁷ Underlying this concern was the implicit recognition that such movements, and the dances, rituals, and other cultural practices they were associated with, signaled a historicity—a creative agency—that the colonized were not supposed to possess. The obsessive regulation of the colonized’s corporeality was meant to reduce the body to nothing more than an automatic component in the system; but the imposition of a habitus adjusted to the colonial order was never absolute, and in the unseemly or undisciplined gestures of the colonized lay the means to contest this system.

Denied access to other forms of historical inscription, the enslaved turned to the amanuensis of the flesh to sustain a countermemory. After emancipation, the body would continue in its role as archive and expressive instrument, reembodying past articulations of resistance and community against new kinds of constraints. Moreover, it would play a similar role for other peoples who were brought to the region and subjected to the depredations of the colonial order, most notably the indentured East Indians. Hence, writes Lovelace:

When we look at our dances and listen to our songs, when we experience the vitality and power of the steelband and hear a stickfight chant and watch the leaps and dexterity of the bongo dance …, we know we have a history of ourselves as subjects. It has not been erased, for it is carried in our bodies.³⁸

The body as it links to the practices of the subaltern class thus opens on to a history that has persisted beneath the apparently ahistorical condition imposed by colonialism. These corporeal practices manifest a habitus coexistent with but different from that structured by the colonial regime. As such, they contain the seeds of a potential alternative to the colonial habitus, for they carry a social content that presupposes new social relations and forms of collectivity. Hence the importance of cultural practice to the national liberation struggle, in which embodied local practice or knowledge is transformed into a national culture that incarnates a national consciousness. For liberation theorists like Fanon and Amilcar Cabral, moreover, this national consciousness was supposed to give on to a social consciousness that would demand the total transformation of society in line with the needs of the poor and the powerless. The antecedents of this transformation lie in those subaltern cultural practices and their opposition to the dominant order.

We can trace the importance of such cultural forms to the development of anticolonial nationalisms in the Caribbean more concretely through religious practice. Religion has been central to a number of resistance movements throughout the region. In the Anglophone Caribbean, for instance, resistance by the enslaved, such as Tacky’s Rebellion in 1760 and the so-called Baptist War of 1831–32 in Jamaica, drew on religious belief as a source of unity and inspiration. Equally, in the postemancipation period, religion played a key role in events such as the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865. Significantly, the various religious movements involved in these events did not just serve to encourage their communities’ actions but were bound up with the very creation and coming to consciousness of those communities. Tacky’s Rebellion provides the clearest example here: researchers have argued that it was the first slave rebellion to incorporate people of different tribal origins, something Monica Schuler attributes to the rise of Myal as a Pan-African religion which addressed itself to the entire slave society, rather than to the microcosms of separate African groups.³⁹ The role of Myal in the rebellion was thus linked to its rallying of a resistant Pan-African ethnic identity, but one that was at the same time already gesturing toward an Afro-Jamaican identity. In bringing the separate tribal traditions together within the space of Jamaica, Myal—itself an apparently new Caribbean phenomenon modeled on West African secret cult societies—emphasized the common African connection yet also signaled the transformation of these traditions within the new environment, a transformation tied to the claim now made to this environment. Here, then, a creolized religious practice became inseparable from the development of a kind of proto-creole nationalism.

Unsurprisingly, the Haitian Revolution provides the most striking instance of such developments. Again, Afro-Caribbean religious (and bodily) practice played a central role in raising a resistant consciousness: according to Haitian oral tradition, the revolution began "with the dance of the lwa, led by a mambo (priestess) and the famed Boukman, at a ceremony at Bois Caïman."⁴⁰ This consciousness would develop into a national consciousness during the struggle that would see Haiti become the second state in the hemisphere to declare itself independent and the first black republic. To the extent that it institutionalized blackness as the index of Haitian citizenship—the Imperial Constitution of 1815, promulgated by Jean-Jacques Dessalines (the first chief of state of the independent Haiti), stated that all Haitians were to be referred to as noirs and that no white man, whatever his nationality, should set foot in Haiti as a master or property owner⁴¹—the republic could be said to have defined itself in terms of a racial nationalism. Yet Dessalines’s emphasis on Haitians as noirs was in fact meant to defuse (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) the antagonism between blacks and mulattoes in the country: noir was to be an ideological concept that would identify all Haitian citizens whatever their shade of skin.⁴² Moreover, while Africa remained a source of inspiration among many Haitian politicians and intellectuals (albeit one they were ambivalent about), they nevertheless clearly emphasized the national specificity of the Haitian experience. Some even began to conceive this specificity in terms of the creolization of cultural influences: We quite like the American are transplanted, stripped of traditions, wrote Emile Nau in 1836, but there is in the fusion of European and African cultures, which constitutes our national character, something that makes us less French than the American is English. This advantage is a real one.⁴³

Such thinking was complemented by the impulse among several of the revolution’s architects, as well as later intellectuals, to situate and conceptualize Haiti within the modern world order.⁴⁴ Despite its isolation by the imperial powers, Haiti was to be not an anomalous enclave but a modern nation-state in which diverse legacies, including, for example, the universalism of French revolutionary rhetoric, were to be indigenized and given radical new meaning as part of an attempt to model an alternative articulation of modernity. Useful here is Michael Dash’s gloss on C. L. R. James’s understanding of the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath. In James’s view, writes Dash, the desire for emancipation was expressed in the form of the struggle to become [a] modern state … and to achieve technological power:

By focusing on state formation as an alternative revolutionary strategy, James was already shifting attention from resistance as marronnage (that is, the creation of isolated communities, united by shared defiance of a dominant force) to the importance of the state—a state that would try to restructure relations shaped by the plantation or colonialism and produce a new self consciousness through the creolizing power of the state.⁴⁵

The revolutionary state, then, was to transform the modern condition into which Haiti had been thrust by the plantation system (for in its agro-industrial organization, the plantation was, as James argued, a modern system),⁴⁶ producing an indigenized Haitian consciousness coincident with a Haitian nation-state organized around the social needs and demands of the Haitian people.

Chapters 1 and 2 in particular will examine in more detail the elaboration of this and other nationalist projects in the Caribbean. But it is worth making a few general remarks here. The examples cited earlier underscore the significance of cultural practice to anticolonial resistance, as well as to the cultivation of a national consciousness. As Neil Larsen asks in his glossing of Fanon: "Does not the ‘national question’ become in fact the question of national culture itself as precisely that sphere within which a ‘national consciousness’ makes the concrete transition from purely objective political theory and strategy to the more subjective level of mass, everyday experience?⁴⁷ But they also highlight the question of the form of the nation-state and its coincidence (or otherwise) with the lived experiences and demands of the majority of its inhabitants, a question that, in the Caribbean context, is inseparable from a consideration of indigenization and creolization as processes that have indelibly marked the social fabric. Fundamental to this book is the understanding that these issues will be registered—in however mediated a fashion—in literary form, for there is no material content, no formal category of artistic creation, however mysteriously transmitted and itself unaware of the process, which did not originate in the empirical reality from which it breaks free."⁴⁸ How, then, have those histories of rupture and reconstruction, of excision and regrafting, of creolization and indigenization, found their way into the form of the Caribbean novel? How has the Caribbean novel articulated the particular character of modernity in the region, and how has it offered utopian glimpses of different social formations? And how has the nation—itself having served to mediate social consciousness and cultural practice—been mediated in literary form? These are the key questions that underwrite this book.

In the remainder of this introduction, I make the case for my approach to the foregoing themes. My emphasis on the nation-state in particular requires some discussion, given what is fast becoming the orthodoxy of postnationalism in the academy, not least within the field of postcolonial studies. Indeed, in what was, at least until the mid-1990s, its dominant poststructuralist avatar, the critical thrust of this field—its disavowal of all forms of nationalism, hostility toward totalities, and celebration of liminality, migrancy, and border crossing—has been integral to the elaboration of postnational perspectives. I am thinking, for example, of the work of Homi Bhabha, whose antihistoricist conceptualization of the nation as narration has provided the vocabulary for many of the current dismissals of the nation-state as a relevant unit of analysis. The distrust of nationalisms exhibited by much postcolonialist-poststructuralist criticism can be traced to the setbacks suffered by national liberation movements following the reassertion of imperial dominance in the 1970s and their own failures in delivering on emancipatory promises.⁴⁹ More recent arguments for thinking postnationally tend to combine this distrust with what is claimed to be the obsolescence of the nation-state in the age of globalization. However, the undifferentiating disavowal of all nationalisms, in the first instance, and approaches to globalization, in the second, that overstate its impact and overlook the way it is articulated with nation-states (and not necessarily in opposition to them) raises a series of problems that I want to take up here in relation to the Caribbean. These include a failure to theorize fully the workings of power at a global level; a lack of attention to intrastate struggles (including class conflict); a celebration of global flows and cultural hybridity that obscures structural inequalities and downplays the often violent nature of such interactions; and a haziness (arising from the relative lack of consideration given to state issues) about how and where an emancipatory politics might be grounded.

Let me first reemphasize that in attending to the nation-state, I am not seeking to reinstall it as the exclusive object of analysis and identification. Nor do I wish to treat it as a discrete or essential unit or view literary categories as equally essential units coinciding with national borders. Rather, my argument takes as its point of departure a world-systems standpoint, understanding the production of localities, nations, and regions in terms of how they are systemically related at a global level as specific social formations registering differential articulations of capitalist modernity as itself a worldwide, singular, and simultaneous yet everywhere uneven and heterogeneous phenomenon.⁵⁰ Such an approach seems, in fact, to be demanded here, given the Caribbean’s historic imbrication in international movements of commodities and people, and the way its national territories have so often been marked by regional determinations—not least in the spheres of economics (due to the small size of many of the states) and literature (due to the tendency for writers to migrate around the region). The restructuring of the global economy since the early 1970s under the aegis of what Samir Amin terms the the logic of unilateral capital has deepened the massively uneven integration of the Caribbean into the world market, simultaneously driving many of its nation-states into crisis.⁵¹ To be clear, therefore, I am