Description
George Lamming is one of the best known, certainly one of the most highly regarded contemporary writers from the Caribbean. Spanning nearly 60 years and encompassing fiction, poetry and critical essays, Lamming’s writing covers the length and breadth of Caribbean intellectual, cultural, political and literary life. Credited as a part of that group of Caribbean activists who awoke the Caribbean to its identity and more specifically to its cultural identity, his works have focused on finding new political and social identity. Indeed, Lamming was a seminal figure in the Caribbean 20th century intellectual tradition and radical anti-colonial tradition. Lamming is best known for his novels. In the Castle of My Skin and The Emigrants take place in England and are largely autobiographical. Of Age and Innocence and Season of Adventure are set on the fictional Caribbean island of San Cristobal. In Water with Berries, the plot of Shakespeare’s The Tempest is used to unmask the imperfections of West Indian society while his final novel, Natives of My Person, gives account of the voyage of a slave-trading ship on the triangular trade route from Europe to Africa to the New World colonies.
In The Aesthetics of Decolonisation, friend and colleague Anthony Bogues pulls together Lamming’s critical works, some previously published, some given as addresses, lectures and interviews. This is accompanied by critical reflections on Lamming’s work by noted scholars such as Andaiye and Sandra Pouchet Paquet as well as a foreword by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.
This much needed reader on Lamming and his work examines the history of the Caribbean and the categories which continue to shape and influence Caribbean identity in our contemporary world.
About the Editor
Anthony Bogues is Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Brown University. He was previously Royce Professor Teaching Excellence and is currently Harmon Family Professor. He is also a Director of the Centre for Caribbean Thought, University of the West Indies, Mona and honorary professor at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.
Contents
Foreword – Freeing the Imagination: Lamming’s Aesthetics of Decolonisation
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
Acknowledgements
Introduction – The Aesthetic Quest for an Insurgent Caribbean Intellectual Practice: George Lamming and Caribbean Thought
Anthony Bogues
SECTION 1: LANGUAGE, POLITICS AND LITERATURE (1953–1990)
- The Negro Writer and His World
- The Education of Feeling
- In the Castle of My Skin: Thirty Years After
- On West Indian Writing
- Politics and Culture
- Tribute to a Tragic Jamaican
- Builders of Our Caribbean House
- Portrait of a Prime Minister
- On the Murder of Rodney
- The Imperial Encirclement
- C.L.R. James, Evangelist
- The Honourable Member
- Nationalism and Nation
- Labour and the Humanising of the Landscape
- Sovereignty, Mobilisation and Popular Consciousness
- In Defence of Cultural Sovereignty
SECTION 2: LAMMING IN CONVERSATION
- ‘A Future They Must Learn’: An Interview by George Kent
- Martin Carter: A Poet of the Americas – An Interview with Stewart Brown
- The Aesthetics of Decolonisation – Anthony Bogues and George Lamming in Conversation
SECTION 3: REFLECTIVE NOTES: THE PAST AND THE PRESENT
- After a Decade
- We Mourn Her to Celebrate Example!
- The Legacy of Eric Williams
- Caribbean Thought: History, Pedagogy and Archive
- Reflections on Writing The Pleasures of Exile
SECTION 4: CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON THE POLITICS, ART AND AESTHETICS OF GEORGE LAMMING
- George Lamming and the Epistemology of Exile: Ways of Seeing, Singularity and Colonialism
Clevis Headley
- Lamming’s Critique of Imperialist Discourse
Glyne Griffith
- The Historic Centrality of Mr Slime: Lamming’s Pursuit of Class Betrayal in Novels and Speeches
Andaiye
- Postcolonial Negations: George Lamming’s Open Future
Supriya Nair
- From Intellectual Workers for Regional Sovereignty to Culture and Sovereignty in the Caribbean and The Sovereignty of the Imagination: The Shifting Ground of a Writer and Public Intellectual
Sandra Pouchet Paquet
- Coming, Coming Home – Must be Read
Tim Hector
SECTION 5: EXTRACT OF NOVEL IN PROGRESS
Columbus: A View From the Other Side
SECTION 6: BIOGRAPHIES
Selected Annotated Biographies and Important Events
Contributors
Index
