Social Science Research Council

"The Caribbean and the Making of Modern British Culture, 1935-2005"

I will read novels and archival materials by Caribbean migrants to England, as well as British-born writers at key moments from the inter-war years to the present, in order to discern ways in which Caribbean people and the new cultures they formed in migrancy influenced British culture more generally. In my readings I will negotiate two major assumptions that underwrite criticism on Caribbean literature and on post-colonialism more generally. The first assumption, associated primarily with then emerging criticism of postcolonial literatures in the 1960's, is that there are identifiable practices, signs, geographies, and histories that make up what we consider to be empire and colony, Britain and West Indies. The second assumption, and the one most prevalent in criticism of the past 20 years, is that in fact these practices, signs, geographies and histories are not so easily taken apart. On this view, Britain and the Caribbean are so historically intertwined as to be in some ways composed of and constructed by each other. My dissertation prioritizes this second assumption even whilst taking into account of the first. Britain has always been in culturally generative dialogue with its colonial other, whether that dialogue has been muted (as during the period of high Modernism) or unavoidable (as during the "race riots" of the mid-twentieth century). My dissertation will look at key phases in that dialogue with the Caribbean colonial other and make claims for the mutually constitutive impact of this dialogue on Caribbean and British cultures. I will begin with C. L. R. James, whose letters and essays from Britain in the 1930's (a decade associated with the "decline" of Modernism) narrate encounters and conflicts with the British establishment (Edith Sitwell and the Woolfs, for example). I will then turn to Caribbean and British working-class writing in the 1950's that was a direct result of post-war immigration from the colonies into the London. The work of Jamaican novelist Andrew Salkey in particular will help me to see how sexuality (anxieties about which were rife in England during this decade) intersects with questions of national and class identity. Finally, I will turn to the contemporary moment, when ideas of "Cool Britannia" converged on "multiculturalism" to create a set of identities and cultural practices that are also imbricated and conflictual. The reception of recent novels by Zadie Smith and Andrea Levy, as much as the novels themselves, will help me to understand the peculiar composition of historical nostalgia and amnesia vis a vis the Caribbean that underwrites much of British culture today.