Fragmentations, phantom limbs, re-memberings: Negotiating bodies, representation, and subjectivity in Caribbean British writing

ABSTRACT

This article examines representations of corporeality in Caribbean British writing and focuses on two novels in particular: George Lamming’s The Emigrants (1954) and David Dabydeen’s The Intended (1991). After outlining relevant insights from the field of body studies and discourses of the body in Caribbean literature, it argues that the novels focus on the body to voice similar concerns about writing, representation, and knowledge. The novel aspect of this article lies in its rereading of the texts’ foregrounding of issues of corporeality. Where corporeal imagery in postcolonial literatures has mostly been conceived as a symptom of the racialization and feminization of the “other” body as a legacy of colonialism, this article shifts the focus towards seeing the novels’ employment of the body as a negotiation of discourses of representation and subjectivity. In probing and problematizing constructivist and materialist conceptions, they furthermore negotiate important shifts in approaching “matter” in literary theory.

KEYWORDS:

• Body
• representation
• subjectivity
• materiality
• George Lamming
• David Dabydeen

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Ashley Dawson (2007), for instance, provides an overview over post-Windrush politics and debates surrounding a “pure body politic” in his introduction to Mongrel Nation (16).

2. This has been most prominently voiced in Homi K. Bhabha’s ([1994] 2004) work on the ambivalence of colonial discourse, where the colonizers’ fixing of the “other’s” body via fetishist stereotypes is a simultaneous indicator of their desire for it (117).

3. Il n’y a pas de hors-texte (Derrida 1967, 227; original emphasis).

4. For these differing interpretations, see, for example, Sarah Pouchet Paquet (1982) and John Clement Ball (2004).

5. Lacan ([1949] 2006, 97) originally develops this idea of the “fragmented body” and an “orthopedic” fantasy of totality in his lecture on “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function”.

6. This is most prominent in Henry Mayhew’s (1851) London Labour and the London Poor, where he describes the lower classes as “vagabond savage[s]” (320). Anne McClintock (1995), in her analysis of advertisements for Pears’ soap, likewise emphasizes the similarities in representations of the working-class and the immigrant body as “dirty others” to the middle-class's “clean”, white body (211).

7. Especially in the work of Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, or Cary Wolfe.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Silvia Gerlsbeck

Silvia Gerlsbeck is a research associate and PhD candidate in English literature and culture at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. Her thesis examines intersections of authorship, masculinity, and ethnicity in Anglo-Caribbean artist novels and focuses on generic refractions and authorial self-fashionings in selected works of Windrush-generation novelists. She is co-editor of The Male Body in Representation: Returning to Matter (Palgrave, 2022), which unites multidisciplinary takes on the male body and gender performances. Her research interests and teaching activities include postcolonial and black British literature, masculinity studies, theories and representations of authorship, cultural and literary theory, speculative fiction, and post-humanism.