Alison Donnell

Companion to contemporary black British culture

Entries include: L^Oswald Boateng David A. Bailey Bhangra Naomi Campbell Channel 4 Feminism Live Art Jungle Hanif Kureishi Photography Notting Hill Carnival SuAndi The Voice Windrush Youth culture

When Writing the Other is Being True to the Self:Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother

When asked how much of her work is autobiographical, Jamaica Kincaid’s stock response is ‘All of it, even the punctuation’. However, readers of her work would be well-accustomed to such statements of devious simplicity and complex clarity They would likewise recognise in the title of her latest work, The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), a playful but incisive disturbance in the accustomed use of language. Like the title of this work, two comments which Kincaid has made in interview imply that, for her, the figure of the mother is implicated in the central relationship between writing and the self around which autobiographical works are structured. My mother used to tell me a lot of things about herself. It’s perhaps one of the ways in which I became a writer. (Kincaid in Bonetti 1992: 127) Clearly the way I became a writer was that my mother wrote my life for me and told it to me. I can’t help but think that it made me interested in the idea of myself as an object. (Kincaid in O’Connor 1985: 6) All of Kincaid’s major fictions, to date, have focused on the mother-daughter relationship; a fact which is perhaps more surprising given that she has written in a variety of genres, periods, voices and cultural locations, in order to unravel the politics of colonialism, neo-colonialism and post-colonialism.

The Short Fiction of Olive Senior

In her poem, ‘Colonial Girls’ School’, Olive Senior finely satirizes the way in which the colonial education system in Jamaica promoted alienating icons of physical beauty, irrelevant versions of historical understanding, and disempowering geographies of belonging. The poem turns on the refrain ‘Nothing about us at all’. In Senior’s short stories the subjects in the schoolroom, and the populations of Jamaica, more widely, are given back the bodies, the voices, the pasts and the island home which the colonial cultural apparatus had wilfully tried to deny them. It is this act of reconnecting the lives of the diverse and shifting populations of Jamaica to literature which most crucially informs Senior’s three collections of short stories: Summer Lightning (1986), Arrival of the Snake-Woman (1989) and Discerner of Hearts (1995). However, Senior’s work is not merely motivated by an oppositional stance to colonial inscriptions, for not only does she write against the erroneous and damaging versions of Jamaican selves which have been scripted and imported by colonial, and, importantly, neo-colonial cultures, but she also recuperates for a written archive the lives of those who remained excluded, unknown and significantly unknowable by those ‘outsiders’ who had been granted the power to tell.

Una Marson and the Fractured Subjects of Modernity: Writing across the Black Atlantic

The pluralizing of modernism under the rubric of new modernist studies has occasioned more than an expansion of this field of cultural enquiry. Arguing not only for a broader and longer view of this literary movement, but also for the inclusion of writers and works that challenge the established orthodoxies of modernist style, subject and politics, new modernist studies has questioned (old) modernist studies, exposing the western, white and often elitist assumptions of the high modernist canon. In its insistence on multiple modernisms, it has allowed for the variegated nature of both cultural forms and cultural locations to be acknowledged and embraced. As an act of critical intervention, it has been particularly useful in making non-western modernisms visible and in attending to those significant ‘neglected works left in the wide margins of the century’ w A L I S O N D O N N E L L ................................................................................................ .......

Feeling Good? Look Again! Feel Good Movies and the Vanishing Points of Liberation in Deepa Mehta's Fire and Gurinder Chadha's Bend It Like Beckham

This article discusses two very different South Asian diasporic films that both promise an identity politics congruent with the objectives of postcolonial feminism alongside a distinctive ‘feel good’ factor: Deepa Mehtas Fire (1997) and Gurinder Chadhas Bend It Like Beckham (2002). Both films explore the pressure that certain ideas of India exert on female subjectivities in the diaspora a.nd at home, and their success as feel good films depends on the viewers ability to understand and ally themselves with the liberation of the central characters from these pressures. By reading the limits as well as the triumphs invoked by the emotional crescendos of these films and the politics of liberation that they endorse, this article also considers other points of continued silence and struggle (specifically queer diasporic subjects and sex workers), not foregrounded by the visual or narrative persuasions of the films themselves.

V S Naipaul, a Queer Trinidadian

No student of anglophone Caribbean literature could long remain innocent of the controversy and difficulty that have characterised V S Naipaul’s relations to Trinidad, the island of his birth, and to the Caribbean more widely. Someone would soon share scandalising sound bites of offence (often out of context) from his works and interviews; or tell them about Naipaul’s infamous response to winning the Nobel Prize in 2001, in which he acknowledged both Britain and India but made no mention of Trinidad. Reading through Naipaul’s significant body of literary works, essays and speeches, they would of course find traces of tension, disdain and disappointment expressed towards the region. Appearing alongside the committed, shapely and almost wholly affectionate literary footsteps of fellow Trinidadians Samuel Selvon, Michael Anthony, Earl Lovelace, Merle Hodge and Lawrence Scott, who tread so steadily in favour and service of their people, Naipaul’s imprints appear visibly scuffed, saw-toothed and often glaringly wrong-footed. There can be little doubt that Naipaul has a vexed relationship with Trinidad and a vexatious reputation as a man of letters. When his authorised biography, The World Is What It Is, written in an unflinching style by Patrick French, was published in 2008, the suspicions that Naipaul was selfish, patrician, brutal and faithless were seemingly confirmed. The magnificent ego of the writer and the opinionated intolerance of the man have certainly led to some extreme and obnoxious public statements about the lives and achievements of others. In an interview with Farrukh Dhondy in 2001, he accused E M Forster of homosexual predation with a colonial twist. Most recently, and ridiculously, in a 2011 interview at the Royal Geographic Society, he claimed that not a single woman writer was his equal. Indeed, it would seem Naipaul has provided plenty of evidence in recent years to support Lawrence Scott’s observation that

Afterword: In Praise of a Black British Canon and the Possibilities of Representing the Nation ‘Otherwise’

In this afterword I want to give thought to what might be at stake in discussing the idea of a black British canon in the cultural and political climate of Britain at the start of the twenty-first century. As noted in the Introduction, this essay does not, therefore, set out a genealogical account of canon formation, but concludes the volume with possible interventions into, and questions derived from, the key critical debates relevant to our understanding of a black British canon today.

All Friends Now?: Critical Conversations, West Indian Literature, and the "Quarrel with History"

In this essay Alison Donnell returns to the material object of Edward Baugh’s essay, published in the pages of the Trinidadian little magazine Tapia in 1977, in order to re-read the force of its arguments in the context of its own politicocultural history and to assess the significance of its publication venue. Donnell attends to Baugh’s own standing in the highly charged field of Caribbean literary criticism as a critic of both Walcott and Naipaul, and acknowledges his creative contribution to this field as a poet. She also considers how, in the years between the original publication of Baugh’s article and its republication, the questions of historical invisibility have entered newly disputed territories that demand attention to how gender, indigeneity, spirituality, and sexuality shape ideas of historical and literary legitimacy, in addition to those foundational questions around a politics of race and class.