Sovereignty of the Imagination (review)

To reiterate an oft-asked question: What can aesthetics possibly contribute to the field of politics? Throughout his long and distinguished career as novelist, essayist and poet, George Lamming has sought, as Anthony Bogues puts it in his introduction to the two lectures collected in Sovereignty of the Imagination (2009), to explore the contours of the dense “relationship between politics, knowledge, language, and the spaces of freedom,” making the Barbadian author, “one of the most important political novelists in Caribbean literature” (xi). This is not exaggerated praise. Today, at the end of a long and productive career, Lamming can be placed within a distinguished tradition of authors from and for whom the Caribbean and its history are of singular importance, writers who also dealt directly with questions of aesthetics and politics, including Frantz Fanon, C. L. R James, Michael Anthony, Derek Walcott and Wilson Harris. Such is the scope and success of Lamming’s overall project.

Lamming’s political, aesthetic and historical points of engagement primarily rest on his “pursuit of the colonial theme,” as Sandra Pouchet Paquet writes. This theme arises from “an acute social consciousness that is vitally concerned with politics and society, that is, with the function of power in a given society, and its effects on the moral, social, cultural, and even aesthetic values of the people in that society” (1). Or, as Lamming would put it: “I have never been able to separate the creative imagination from the political culture in which it functions” (79).

The two lectures collected under the title Sovereignty of the Imagination serve as worthwhile introductions to Lamming’s ongoing engagement with the colonial theme and its relation to the Caribbean’s history, a process of subjugation that still, to a certain extent, exists today. As Lamming says,

The last 60 years since 1938 must be regarded, therefore, as a period of transition. We have seen the gradual erosion of an old social order: the political directorates have changed complexion, but they operate within the same basic institutions. There has been no great structural change in the patterns of ownership and control . . . Independence has not yet won the right to sovereignty.

(14–15)

The process of decolonization is far from over, as the old faces of colonial oppression have been supplanted by new ones, leaving the Caribbean in a state of “contradiction . . . being at once independent and neocolonial” (10). Sovereignty of the Imagination is part of Lamming’s ongoing project of exorcising the demons of the colonial experience, demons that turned the Caribbean into a space that “endured a different kind of subjugation . . . a terror of the mind, a daily exercise in self-mutilation, black versus black in a battle for self-improvement” (7).

The title lecture, delivered in 2003 at a conference held in Jamaica, finds Lamming narrating his own personal story and relating it to the much larger tapestry that is the history of the Caribbean. The talk primarily focuses on the production of knowledge: how it is “produced, acquired, and distributed” and the fact that it “is never passive” (34–35). As such, Lamming spends much of the lecture focusing on the history of the educational system throughout different parts of the Caribbean, and how such institutions both supported colonialism and acted as potential sites for liberatory politics. The scope of the lecture is impressive, if brief, and it illustrates Lamming’s commitment to progressive and populist politics. One section in particular, titled “The Practice of Literature is Rooted in these Questions: Literature, Freedom, and the Imagination,” brings to the forefront Lamming’s ideas on how aesthetics and politics can operate in conjunction, and prefigures the main argument of the second talk. The lecture, to an extent, replicates the author’s approach to fiction writing: “A novelist sets out to explore the history and the nature of an individual or personal relationship. But every relationship is a social fact because the relationship is engaged with another, and is influenced by the others who may or may not be directly connected to the individuals . . . All...