Caribbean writing is an emigrant tradition. The first waves of native-born authors from the region all spent significant portions of their lives abroad and, almost without exception, built their fame upon the desires of metropolitan audiences for knowledge of their colonies. Accordingly, the famous names of Lamming, Naipaul, Selvon, Césaire and Glissant are all stamped with a slightly less famous departure date. While many critics have noted these facts, there has been little sustained analysis of how the unique social positions and preoccupations of emigrants have affected the works of these five writers or their peers. This thesis is an attempt to address this issue. Its argument is that Caribbean emigrant authors spoke from unique social and conceptual loci. Through detailed, comparative readings of these five authors’ first major works, alongside considerations of their self-assessments, critical opinion on their oeuvres, Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the literary field and Antonio Gramsci’s theory of the organic intellectual, the argument advanced is that although these authors actively positioned themselves, and were positioned by their readers, in such a way that their emigrant status has had its importance elided, that status is present and potent in their post-emigration works. While the concerns of these writers all altered over the course of their careers, their early experiences of emigration shaped some of their most widely read texts and resulted in a harmony between them that transcends the authors’ differing islands of origin and their later thematic and political preoccupations.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:535628 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | McIntosh, Malachi |
| Publisher | University of Warwick |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/35526/ |
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