The Nineteenth-Century Roots of Postcolonial Caribbean Discourse: Transnationalism and Anticolonialism in Creole Recitations

Apart from the fact that it is one of very few book-length studies of a Caribbean-based British Caribbean black intellectual from the nineteenth century, and one of even fewer written by a literary studies scholar, Faith L. Smith’s Creole Recitations stands out because of the light it sheds on the mechanics of anglophone Afro-Caribbean intellectual formation, self-representation, and epistemology posited in newspapers, nonfiction books, and speeches produced in the Caribbean during this period. This article is a reading of a conceptual thread that runs through Smith’s book—the ways in which the approaches to transnational engagement embedded within English colonialism are at once accepted, interrogated, or utilized by Caribbean public figures in the nineteenth century. As such, Smith’s book provides a way for us to situate modern Caribbean studies within an intellectual genealogy and a model for contextualizing the issues, experiences, and approaches that began to be highlighted with the advent of postcolonial studies.