Through the critical discourse analysis of Anglophone Caribbean literature as a polyrhythmic performance, this research sets out to examine the claim that, in a world in a state of constant flux, emerging Caribbean voices are offering a challenging perspective on how to negotiate identity away from the binary constructs of centre and margin. It argues that the Caribbean writer, as a self-conscious producer of alternative discourses, offers an innovative and transcultural vision of the self. This research consists of three stages which integrate critical discourse and literary analysis with colonial/postcolonial and socio-cultural theories. Firstly, it investigates the power of language as an operation of discourse through which to apprehend reality within a binary system of representation. It then examines how the concept of discourse, as a site of contestation and meaning, enables the elaboration of a Caribbean counter-discourse. Finally, it explores the role, within the Caribbean text, of literary techniques such as narrative fragmentation, irony, dialogism, intertextuality, ambivalence and the carnivalesque to challenge, disrupt the established order and offer new perspectives of being. My study of Anglophone Caribbean texts highlights the power of language and the authority of the ‘book’ as subtle, insidious tools of domination and colonisation. It also demonstrates how, by allowing hitherto marginalised voices to write themselves into being, Caribbean writers enable linear narratives and monolithic visions of reality to be contested and other perspectives of understanding and of meaning to be uncovered. It exposes the plurality and the interweaving of discourses in the Caribbean text as a liberating, dynamic force which enables new subject positions and realities to emerge along the lines of similarity and difference. At a time when the issue of identity is one of the central problems in the world today, the research argues that this celebration of the plural, the fluid and the ambivalent offers new ways of being away from the stultifying perspective of essentialist forms.

The novel shows how a young Indo-Guyanese immigrant to the UK is racialized; aspiring to leave behind the "messiness" and confusion of the poverty-stricken immigrant lives he sees around him, he goes to Cambridge. The story is narrated by this character long after, in ways that reveal how this aspiration was assimilative and colonizing, encouraging him to abandon his friends and his roots. His life story makes it clear how different systems of racial categorization work in Guyana and in the UK to violently separate those who might be friends, lovers, and allies.

<p>This study is concerned with subject formation in the fiction of contemporary postcolonial authors Abdulrazak Gurnah, Yvonne Vera, and David Dabydeen. In contextualised readings of a total of nine works – Gurnah’s Admiring Silence (1996), By the Sea (2001), and Desertion (2005); Vera’s Without a Name (1996), Butterfly Burning (1998), and The Stone Virgins (2002); Dabydeen’s Disappearance (1993), Turner (1994), and A Harlot’s Progress (1999) – it explores thematic and formal aspects of the subject’s constitution in the texts. Investigating the representation of material and discursive traces that constitute the individual, this study has a double aim. First, it describes the particular historical formations that mould the individual in the different texts. Second, it investigates the tactics used to imaginatively upset these formations in order to present new and more enabling modes of being.</p><p>Gurnah’s fiction depicts the intricate meshwork of social codes, emotions, and narratives that shape subjectivity in a highly unstable and cosmopolitan social reality. His novels repeatedly thematise cultural disorientation, migration, and the efforts of establishing a minimum of social and narrative stability in the form of a home. The chapter reads Gurnah’s fiction against a background of Zanzibari history and diaspora and suggests that various forms of “entanglements” paradoxically provide the means to pull the subject out of states of anxiety and alienation into more viable states of being. Vera’s novels engage a powerful Zimbabwean discourse on history, and the psychic and bodily wounds that result from its violent impact on the subject. Set at moments of special and contested historical importance, her novels address the exclusions and silences of this discourse in order both to assess its effects and the possibilities of imagining alternative versions that would allow other modes of subjectivity. These possibilities are manifested, thematically and textually, through an improvisational form of “movement,” geographical, linguistic, and musical. Dabydeen’s fiction investigates the textual dimensions of identity and its connections to larger cultural archives of tropes and languages. Focusing on the constraining yet constitutive impact of various modes of colonial and racial rhetoric, his literary texts display a manipulation of textual elements from these archives that approaches a re-conception of the subject. To describe this manipulation of English and Caribbean sources, thematised and dramatically staged in his fiction, I am using Dabydeen’s own phrase, “creative amnesia.”</p>

This study is concerned with subject formation in the fiction of contemporary postcolonial authors Abdulrazak Gurnah, Yvonne Vera, and David Dabydeen. In contextualised readings of a total of nine works – Gurnah’s Admiring Silence (1996), By the Sea (2001), and Desertion (2005); Vera’s Without a Name (1996), Butterfly Burning (1998), and The Stone Virgins (2002); Dabydeen’s Disappearance (1993), Turner (1994), and A Harlot’s Progress (1999) – it explores thematic and formal aspects of the subject’s constitution in the texts. Investigating the representation of material and discursive traces that constitute the individual, this study has a double aim. First, it describes the particular historical formations that mould the individual in the different texts. Second, it investigates the tactics used to imaginatively upset these formations in order to present new and more enabling modes of being. Gurnah’s fiction depicts the intricate meshwork of social codes, emotions, and narratives that shape subjectivity in a highly unstable and cosmopolitan social reality. His novels repeatedly thematise cultural disorientation, migration, and the efforts of establishing a minimum of social and narrative stability in the form of a home. The chapter reads Gurnah’s fiction against a background of Zanzibari history and diaspora and suggests that various forms of “entanglements” paradoxically provide the means to pull the subject out of states of anxiety and alienation into more viable states of being. Vera’s novels engage a powerful Zimbabwean discourse on history, and the psychic and bodily wounds that result from its violent impact on the subject. Set at moments of special and contested historical importance, her novels address the exclusions and silences of this discourse in order both to assess its effects and the possibilities of imagining alternative versions that would allow other modes of subjectivity. These possibilities are manifested, thematically and textually, through an improvisational form of “movement,” geographical, linguistic, and musical. Dabydeen’s fiction investigates the textual dimensions of identity and its connections to larger cultural archives of tropes and languages. Focusing on the constraining yet constitutive impact of various modes of colonial and racial rhetoric, his literary texts display a manipulation of textual elements from these archives that approaches a re-conception of the subject. To describe this manipulation of English and Caribbean sources, thematised and dramatically staged in his fiction, I am using Dabydeen’s own phrase, “creative amnesia.”