What it Means to Stay: reterritorialising the Black Atlantic in Erna Brodber's writing of the local

Abstract

The emphasis on migratory subjectivities within postcolonial studies has come from many directions—Bhabha, Gilroy, Appadurai, Boyce Davies—and their convergence has created a critical practice in which diaspora studies takes centre stage. More specifically the way in which the Caribbean person is given emblematic status as the metropolitan migrant is made clear in James Clifford's declaration that ‘We are all Caribbeans now…in our urban archipelagos'. This paper examines the serious impact on the critical reception of Caribbean writings that has been made as a result of the fact that metropolitan diasporas are now the privileged places in which to be properly ‘postcolonial’. It is my aim to show how Erna Brodber's culturally specific studies have enormous value in the face of the more general and flattened enunciations of diaspora and creolisation which are being circulated at a theoretical level. I shall look at two fairly recent pieces of writing by Brodber: a pamphlet entitled ‘The people of my Jamaican village (1817 – 1948)’ and an essay entitled ‘Where are all the others?’ in the book Caribbean Creolisation1.

Notes

K Balutansky & MA Sourieau (eds), Caribbean Creolization: Reflections on the Cultural Dynamics of Language, Literature and Identity, Miami: University Press of Florida & Jamaica, University of the West Indies, Press, 1998.

E Brodber, ‘The people of my Jamaican village, 1817 – 1948’, Jamaica: Blackspace, 1999.

J Clifford, ‘Travelling Cultures’ in L Grossberg, C Nelson & P Treichler (eds), Cultural Studies, New York: Routledge, 1992, pp 96 – 116.

P Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London: Verso, 1993; A Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Public Worlds Volume 1, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996; H Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994; R Cohen (ed), The Cambridge Survey of World Migration, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995; J Clifford, ‘Traveling cultures’, in L Grossberg, C Nelson & P Treichler (eds), Cultural Studies, New York: Routledge, 1992, pp 96 – 116; ‘Diasporas’, Cultural Anthropology, 9 (3), 1994, pp 302 – 338, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997; C Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996; B Robbins, Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.

P Gilroy, 1993.

Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, London: New Beacon Books, 1980; Myal, London: New Beacon Books, 1988; Louisiana, London: New Beacon Books, 1994. Even Brodber's remarkable novels have received markedly less international attention than they deserve. The April 2002 event, ‘From Kumblas to Blackspace: a symposium on Erna Brodber’ organised by the Department of Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies, Mona (Jamaica) in Woodside, St.Mary, Jamaica did give serious recognition of Erna Brodber within the Caribbean intellectual community.

E Brodber, 1999.

‘Where are all the others?’, in K Balutansky & MA Sourieau (eds), Caribbean Creolization: Reflections on the Cultural Dynamics of Language, Literature and Identity, Miami: University Press of Florida & Jamaica, University of the West Indies Press, 1998, pp 68 – 75.

F Birbalsingh, Frontiers of Caribbean Literature in English, London & Basingstoke: Macmillan Educational Ltd, 1996; D Cumber Dance, New World Adams: Conversations with Contemporary West Indian Writers, Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 1992; P Henry, Caliban's Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy, New York & London: Routledge, 2000.

Ibid, p vii.

Whilst working at the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) in Mona, Jamaica, Brodber collected the oral histories of elders in rural Jamaica and this work later informed her third novel, Louisiana (1994).

Brodber, 1999, p 29.

S Puri, The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post/Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, p 9.

Brodber, 1998, p 69.

Ibid, p 69, my italics.

Ibid, p 71.

Ibid, p. 72.

Ibid, p 73.

Ibid, p 75.