Literary Histories of the Early Anglophone Caribbean

Islands in the Stream

Nicole N. Aljoe, Brycchan Carey, Thomas W. Krise, Nicole N. Aljoe, Brycchan Carey, Thomas W. Krise

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319715919
• eBook ISBN: 9783319715926
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Caribbean has traditionally been understood as a region that did not develop a significant 'native' literary culture until the postcolonial period. Indeed, most literary histories of the Caribbean begin with the texts associated with the independence movements of the early twentieth century. However, as recent research has shown, although the printing press did not arrive in the Caribbean until 1718, the roots of Caribbean literary history predate its arrival. This collection contributes to this research by filling a significant gap in literary and historical knowledge with the first collection of essays specifically focused on the literatures of the early Caribbean before 1850.

© The Author(s) 2018

N. N. Aljoe et al. (eds.)Literary Histories of the Early Anglophone CaribbeanNew Caribbean Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71592-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Nicole N. Aljoe¹, Brycchan Carey² and Thomas W. Krise³

(1)

Department of English, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

(2)

Department of Humanities, Northumbria University, New Castle-Upon-Tyne, UK

(3)

Department of English, Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, WA, USA

End Abstract

This volume of essays on the subject of early Caribbean literature aims to provide scholars and readers with a sense of the richness and complexity of more than two centuries of English language literary works by and about people in a region marked by being the first place that the Old and New worlds collided, where a near-complete genocide was followed by the largest forced migration in history; where mass-scale deforestation was followed by the world’s first monoculture; where previously unimaginable wealth helped fuel the industrialization and imperial expansion of Europe; and where those empires clashed violently and traded territories more than in other parts of the imperialized globe.

Each of the terms in “Early Caribbean Literature” is open to debate. For our purposes, “early” describes the period from the first written accounts of European contact with the Caribbean region, from 1492 onwards, until the age of Emancipation in the nineteenth century. Given that our focus is on the English-speaking colonies of the Caribbean, the main time period runs from the first permanent English settlement in St. Christopher in 1624 until the few decades that followed the British Emancipation Act in 1833. Our second term, “Caribbean,” describes the islands in and close to the Caribbean Sea, as well as those continental societies that consider themselves (both in the early period and today) as being part of Caribbean society; for example, the modern states of Guyana and Belize. Finally, we define “Literature” very broadly to include the full range of both descriptive and imaginative texts written in the Caribbean region or about it, from poems, plays, and novels on the one hand to biographies, voyages, and scientific writings on the other. This expansive definition allows for texts from The Tempest to Robinson Crusoe to Treasure Island, but, in practice, we tend to focus on those by writers with more direct experience of the region, such as James Grainger’s The Sugar Cane, J. W. Orderson’s Creoleana, or Mary Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures.

Despite this broad definition, we do acknowledge limitations to our project. In particular, the texts considered in these essays are mostly confined to those written in English. This may reflect our own interests and abilities, but it also reflects a more widespread cultural reality. While the Caribbean is home to literatures in English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Papiamento, Haitian creole, as well as a wide range of patois and creoles arising from the contact of African languages with various imperial ones, each language group tended (then and now) to pay more attention to others from their own language group than to closer neighbors who speak other languages. For instance, people in Jamaica (in the early period and today) pay closer attention to culture and events a thousand miles away in Barbados than they do to the same issues in nearby Haiti or Cuba. Similarly, French speakers in Martinique are more aware of far-away French Guiana and Haiti than they are of nearby St. Lucia or Dominica. Certain issues and events, however, such as the Haitian Revolution, drew much attention in the English-speaking Caribbean and sparked a large body of literature in English, and therefore make their way into our realm of early Anglophone Caribbean literature. Likewise, some texts and ideas were too important to remain confined to any single language community and had a wider distribution through translation, imitation, and inspiration, and chapters of this volume touch on translations from French, Spanish, German, and Dutch texts.

While we contend that early Caribbean literature is a rich and diverse body of writing, the need for this volume exists because of the relative lack of literary and textual studies of the early Caribbean. And while some Caribbean-based scholars such as Elsa Goveia, Kamau Brathwaite (writing as a trained historian), Barbara Lalla, Verene Shepherd, and Hilary McD Beckles, engaged in important foundational explorations of early Caribbean cultures, that work was often difficult to access. Historians have always accorded the region an important role in the making of the modern world but, until recent decades, literary scholars tended to treat writing concerned with the early Caribbean as a subsidiary of British or American studies. Some literary critics from the region question whether literary texts written by colonizers and slavers in the early period should be included within the definition of “Caribbean Literature” at all, and prefer to assign the literary production of the colonial period to the national and imperial literature of the colonizers, in this case, to British literature. While this is a reasonable position, in practice scholars of British literature have generally located early Caribbean writing within the category of American literature. In turn, Americanists have long tended to focus attention on the literary works by and about people living in the North American colonies that eventually became the United States. The result has been that early Caribbean literature is often overlooked by literary scholars and sometimes deliberately ignored.

The material conditions of early Caribbean publishing have had something to do with this state of affairs. When compared with the prodigious and expanding output of printing houses in eighteenth-century London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Boston, and Philadelphia, published works from the Caribbean may seem sparse; imaginative literature and belles lettres especially so. The relatively limited production of these texts in the Caribbean no doubt contributed to the failure of literary scholars to accord early Caribbean literature its due place in literary history, but the largely metropolitan and high-cultural interests of academics in the established universities of the English-speaking world also tended to relegate this literature to the margins until late in the twentieth century. There has nevertheless been a modest increase in academic attention to early Caribbean writing in recent years, prompted in part by broader historical and scholarly events and debates. The majority of the United Kingdom’s Caribbean colonies achieved independence between 1958 and 1983 and this coincided with a period of sustained immigration into the United Kingdom from the Caribbean. Interest in the history and culture of the region improved in British universities as a result, albeit more slowly than it might have done, at the same time that scholars from across the world developed the field of postcolonial literary studies. In North America, and particularly in the United States, the twentieth-century development of early American studies, with its attendant analysis of non-literary texts via the lens of literary studies, opened the disciplinary door to treating the natural histories, travel accounts, pro- and antislavery polemics, sermons, political texts, and elements of visual culture as worthy subjects of literary attention. These developments on both sides of the Atlantic, although often more concerned with later periods and other regions, also promoted further study of the literature of the early Caribbean, albeit at their margins. There remains, however, some distance to travel before early Caribbean literature achieves the attention it deserves.

Another context for the relatively slow development of the study of early Caribbean literature has been the tendency of scholars of contemporary Caribbean literature to date the origins of the field to the earliest postcolonial writers such as C. L. R. James in the 1930s, followed by John Hearne, George Lamming, Edgar Mittelholzer, V. S. Naipaul, Samuel Selvon, Derek Walcott, and others in the post-Second World War period. Contemporary Caribbean literary critics also often restrict the definition of “Caribbean writer” to those born of Afro- and Indo-Caribbean ancestry who also continue to live and work in the region. This definition can exclude writers like Jean Rhys and V. S. Naipaul: Rhys because she was of European ancestry and left Dominica when she was 18 years of age, and Naipaul because he also left Trinidad as a young man, never to return as a permanent resident. A further complexity is that Caribbean literature has played an important role in the development of national and regional identities as the former colonies of the Caribbean became independent states. In contrast to many larger countries, however, “national” identity in the Caribbean can often be transcended by “regional” identity. In this way, achievements such as Marlon James’s receipt of the 2015 Man Booker Prize for his novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), is a cause for great pride not just in James’s Jamaica, but throughout the region. This means that defining what constitutes Caribbean literature has very real implications for the identity and sense of value of more than seven million people living in the nearly two dozen nations, colonies, and territories that make up the English-speaking Caribbean. With so many layers of complexity and importance, scholars of the early Caribbean need to be sensitive to the contemporary impact of their work.

At an organizational level, literary study of the early Caribbean arose in the context of early American studies on the one hand and early modern and eighteenth-century British literary studies on the other. In the early 1990s, early Americanist literary scholars in the United States created two societies devoted to ensuring that the colonial and early national period of American literature received attention in the American Literature Association and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS). Those two early American literature societies merged under the name of the Society of Early Americanists in 1999. Meanwhile, Caribbean literature of the twentieth century began to draw attention from the 1980s onward. Issues of postcolonialism and other literary theories, as well as the subjects of race, class, and gender, made the Caribbean a site of particular interest and complexity. Literature departments across North America and in the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand began to hire Caribbean specialists. Scholars of eighteenth-century Britain and colonial North America also began to take notice of the Caribbean as a nexus for theoretical issues that gained interest in the 1980s and 1990s. Using the model of the Society of Early Americanists, a group of scholars interested in the early Caribbean founded the Early Caribbean Society (ECS) in 2002 to promote the representation of the Caribbean in various scholarly society conferences throughout the Caribbean, the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. In the early 2010s, the ECS conducted a series of symposia, which included scholars from Australia, the Caribbean, the United Kingdom, and the United States meeting in St. James, Barbados; San Juan, Puerto Rico; and London, United Kingdom. Research presented at these symposia contributed substantially to the essays included in the present volume.

The ECS fulfils an important scholarly need. Early Caribbeanists, like Early Americanists, tend to be somewhat isolated institutionally. Universities rarely have more than one such specialist on the faculty, making the international scholarly association all the more important to the exchange of ideas and the support for individual scholars’ research agendas. Despite this apparent isolation, however, many other scholars of British, American, or literatures in English are finding connections between their scholarly interests and texts from the early Caribbean. The present volume was accordingly conceived as a way to provide both dedicated early Caribbeanists as well as scholars and readers with related or even tangential interests with a set of literary historical essays to orient their research into the early literature of the region and to provoke questions for further study. As a relatively new field of literary inquiry, early Caribbean literature is beginning to develop anthologies and editions of texts for use in classrooms, and some Caribbean texts have been included in standard classroom anthologies of British and American literature over the past decade or so. At the same time, there is increasing recognition of the part that the Caribbean has played more broadly in the development of literatures in English from the early modern and eighteenth-century periods onwards. As the essays in this volume demonstrate, early Caribbean literature touches on issues that transcend the early modern world and have important implications for classroom and civic discussions about issues including colonialism and neo-imperialism, racism and ethnic identity, religion and ideology, capitalism and trade, and exploitation and warfare. The region also plays an important role in the development of academic disciplines and literary genres from natural history to journalism, and from the novel to the georgic. Some of the most potent portrayals of race, racism, slavery, piracy, and adventurers also originate in the Caribbean. As an emerging field of academic study, early Caribbean literary history has immense potential to transform our understanding of both the early Caribbean itself and the many broader discourses which it generated and sustained.

Literary Histories of the Early Anglophone Caribbean: Islands in the Stream builds on the important work of earlier Caribbean-based scholars and comprises work by scholars from Australia, the Caribbean, North America, and the United Kingdom. Some of the authors come to the field of early Caribbean literature from a position of expertise in other regions and specialties, yet all have early Caribbean studies at the heart of their research. The collective goal of this volume is to provide other scholars and readers with considerations of the literary historical context within which to situate key issues for further study. To facilitate this, the collection brings to bear a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches, as well as offering readings of a broad selection of texts from across the Caribbean world in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

The opening chapters of the volume seek to recover lost or overlooked facets of the early Caribbean, from indigenous cultures to medical discourse and the evangelical experience. In Chap. 2, Keith Sandiford explores memory and rememory. Reading the pre-Columbian archives collected in the work of Ricardo E. Alegría (1978) and Louis Allaire’s work on the Island Caribs of the Lesser Antilles (1973) alongside Father Ramon Pane’s Relación Acerca de las Antigüedades de los Indios (1498) and William Earle’s Obi; or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack (1800), Sandiford uses current notions of memory as an analytical tool to explore a paradigm of early Caribbean literary history that privileges the mythic consciousness and material culture of indigenous Caribbean people, and the occult knowledge and revolutionary imaginary of transplanted African slaves. In Chap. 3, Sue Thomas examines early Caribbean evangelical life narratives, reading a range of these narratives dating from 1768 to 1835, to show that they offer evidence of the historical soundscapes of plantation slavery cultures and the complex processes of creolization and translation in the inscription of lives. She thereby highlights the literary and historical significance of a genre of West Indian writing usually overlooked in accounts of the early Caribbean. In Chap. 4, Kelly Wisecup focuses on botanist and physician Hans Sloane’s case studies of disease in his Voyage to Jamaica (1707–25), Benjamin Moseley’s medical tracts, and James Grainger’s georgic poem The Sugar Cane (1764) to call for new methodologies for studying the medical cultures of the early Caribbean that attend to Afro-Caribbean knowledge and practices and to colonists’ strategies of domination, as well as to moments when African knowledge shaped not just the content but also the form of colonial writing.

The essays in the central section of the volume are largely concerned with strategies of testimony, reportage, and representation. In Chap. 5, Jo Anne Harris examines Caribbeana, a collection of entries first printed by Samuel Keimer in the Barbados Gazette (1732–38), to argue that as creoles challenged imperial authority and responded to London’s metropolitan discourse, they acquired the legal, political, and cultural means to act as agents for their own economic interests and that the changing tone and shifting viewpoints of the essays, poetry, and debates published in both the Barbados Gazette and Caribbeana reflected the genesis of a literary metamorphosis from imperial to creole. In Chap. 6, Nicole N. Aljoe, reads “The Speech of John Talbot Campo-Bell,” a response to “The Speech of Moses Bon Sa’am” (1736), which was reported to be that of a Maroon leader exhorting a crowd that included slaves to retaliate against the system of enslavement by attacking Jamaican plantation owners, to argue that the narrative reveals the importance of slave voices to early print culture in the Caribbean as well as important details about slave lives, and that the fact that its message is profoundly mediated should not inhibit close readings of the text. In Chap. 7, Richard Frohock looks beyond the celebrated story of female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read to consider how stories of female captives are used to articulate the attributes of male captors. Reading Woodes Rogers’s Cruising Voyage Round the World (1712), Exquemelin’s Buccaneers of America (1678), and Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Pyrates (1724), Frohock argues that looking beyond Bonny and Read generates new insights about the role of women and the limits of egalitarian qualities of piratical societies as represented in key eighteenth-century piracy narratives.

The last three chapters of this volume consider questions of literary form and literary genre. In Chap. 8, Candace Ward and Tim Watso...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. “Memory, Rememory, and the Moral Constitution of Caribbean Literary History”
• 3. Early Caribbean Evangelical Life Narrative
• 4. The Promise of the Tropics: Wealth, Illness, and African Bodies in Early Anglo-Caribbean Medical Writing
• 5. Order, Disorder, and Reorder: The Paradox of Creole Representations in Caribbeana (1741)
• 6. Testimonies of the Enslaved in the Caribbean Literary History
• 7. Beyond Bonny and Read: Blackbeard’s Bride and Other Women in Caribbean Piracy Narratives
• 8. Early Creole Novels in English Before 1850: Hamel, the Obeah Man and Warner Arundell: The Adventures of a Creole
• 9. Colonial Vices and Metropolitan Corrections: Satire and Slavery in the Early Caribbean
• 10. Finding the Modern in Early Caribbean Literature
• Back Matter