ISLAND IMAGINARIES: CARIBBEAN WOMEN WRITERS MAPPING FREEDOM BEYOND DEVELOPMENT FROM 1980-2020

Abstract

Island Imaginaries: Women Writers Mapping Freedom Beyond Development in Caribbean Literature from 1980-2020, argues that island representations in Caribbean women’s texts, published between 1980 and 2020, stage complex relationships between literary experimentation and development discourse. Development projects, underwritten by racial capitalism, create social and environmental catastrophes and rupture the social order such that realism and modernism, the forms favored by Caribbean postcolonial writers until the 1980s, seem inadequate to the new social realities. Therefore, many Caribbean women writers turn to literary experimentation in order to meditate on the most pressing concerns of contemporary Caribbean life. I read the discourse of development as a part of the justification, reception, and experience of globalization for those of us in the so-called Global South; I theorize that development discourse, post 1980, governs the convergence of the ‘perfectibility’ of the Human with the proliferation of capital.The project is bolstered by an inter-disciplinary framework that puts development studies in productive conversation with postcolonial literary studies, Black studies, and the environmental humanities. Chapter one examines two works of experimental nonfiction, Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place (1988), and Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes on Belonging (2001), as interventionist texts which excavate colonial constructions of island imaginaries towards fashioning poetics of underdevelopment that highlight expropriation as the social and political precursor to any economic process of underdevelopment. Chapter two argues that in The Rainmaker’s Mistake (2007), Erna Brodber’s radical experimentation can best be described as a decipherment practice that reveals the aesthetic operations of development discourse. Chapter three is a reading of Diana McCaulay’s work of speculative fiction, Daylight Come (2020) which critiques the values of Western civilization at the heart of our current model of development. The Epilogue examines the contentious relationship between Blackness and Creole Nationalism and makes a case against ‘Postmodernism’ as an all-encompassing categorization for experimentation that surpasses modernism. Overall, Island Imaginaries maps the stylistic and aesthetic dimensions of dominant development discourse while identifying the grounds for creating alternate futures. The literary experimentation from the Caribbean women writers I discuss presents alternate articulations of place and personhood, undergirded by the particularities of Caribbean history, that may reveal different paths towards progress and freedom – alternatives which are not contingent on anti-blackness, geological endangerment, and other forms of unfreedom.