In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

6 Anticolonial Authority and the Postcolonial Occasion for Speaking George Lamming and Martin Carter The dismantling of the colonial system and the emerging dominance of the postcolonial in the decades following World War II mark a major passage in Caribbean literary history. Chapter 5 described the dangers facing literary intellectuals as their alignment with a counterpublic became identified as incompatible with national consolidation during the 1950s and 1960s. At the same time, many of the writers associated with anticolonial nationalism began to question their own participation in the bourgeois public sphere they had helped to establish . Chapters 7 and 8 look at how testimonio and Caribbean cultural studies emerge from this rethinking. This chapter focuses on George Lamming and Martin Carter, two of the most prominent writers of the West Indian literary renaissance of the 1950s, to examine how they positioned themselves and their writing in relation to colonial power and the decolonization struggles. Associating their work with anticolonialism gave their writing a legitimate voice in the Caribbean public sphere, and allowed them to unite the dissociated activities of art and action just as José Martí and Jacques Roumain had. Yet Lamming and Carter press at the limits of the public sphere those writers helped to create, seeing its attachment to the literary as a form of exclusion. Uncertain how to forge a new heroic literary project, these authors reveal how their confidence in the authority of their own literary discourse increasingly wavers, even as they point the way to how a new, postcolonial Caribbean literature might find an occasion for speaking. The biographies of these two giants of Caribbean anticolonial writing show remarkable parallels. Carter and Lamming were both born in British colonies in 1927, Carter in British Guiana (now Guyana) and Lamming in Barbados. Both began their careers by publishing poetry in local journals in the late 1940s, and then brought out major books in the 153 Authority and the Postcolonial Occasion early 1950s: Carter’s poetry collection The Hill of Fire Glows Red in 1951, and Lamming’s novel In the Castle of My Skin in 1953. Both authors published prolifically during the 1950s,1 and collaborated on the 1966 New World Quarterly issue commemorating Guyanese independence .2 Their literary production slowed considerably during the 1960s and 1970s,3 though, and in Lamming’s case ended completely with the publication of Natives of My Person in 1971. Although Carter lived until 1997, and Lamming is still alive, neither author published any major new creative work after Carter’s 1980 collection Poems of Affinity. Why did Lamming and Carter stop publishing literary work after such promising beginnings? In Lamming’s case, the standard response of Caribbean critics has been that exile eventually took a toll on him, and that extended separation from his homeland drained him of the organic connection to his people that energized his earliest work.4 For Carter, critics point to precisely the opposite circumstances for his increasing withdrawal from literature: Gemma Robinson notes the standard views, that Carter’s lack of access to metropolitan “publishing contracts” (44) and his growing cynicism toward his homeland’s “philistinism ” (53) made it impossible for him to continue writing.5 These kinds of readings position Carter and Lamming at opposite ends of the field of possibilities available to Caribbean writers—to stay or to go— with both paths appearing to be equally futile. Yet Caribbean writers from this period, both at home and abroad, did continue to write; looking solely at their location thus inadequately explains the trajectories of Lamming and Carter.6 Instead of focusing on their geographic locale, I examine the many affinities in the kind of space staked out by Lamming and Carter within a shifting Caribbean public sphere. I argue that the passage from colonialism to postcoloniality, and its impact on the Caribbean literary field during these years, challenged politically committed writers like Lamming and Carter with a new world to which their literary discourse could not entirely adapt.7 During the modern colonial period, a particular configuration of literature and politics became privileged, in which literature derived its authority from positioning itself as speaking for both a Caribbean national public and a counterpublic of resistance. The social, political, and economic upheaval at the end of the colonial period—decolonization in the British islands , the Cuban Revolution, changes in status in the French islands and Puerto Rico, the intensifying penetration of North American culture in the form of audio and visual media, the opening...

Share