The Trickster at the Border: Cross-Cultural Dialogues in the Caribbean

Abstract

The Caribbean has occupied an ambivalent place in postcolonial studies, contributing key critics and ideas to the field but, nevertheless, dislocating many of its favourite themes and categories. Historically, geographically and linguistically it problematizes the borders of academic study, and constantly reappears in different guises — the Antilles, the West Indies, the Americas. In this context, the Amerindian has had to be the most expert of all shape-shifters, confined, as s/he often is, at the corners of critical inquiry. In this essay, I will look at a short story by an anglophone Caribbean writer, Wilson Harris, which specifically engages with Amerindian perspectives, and in a context of pre- as well as post-1492 cross-culturalities. I hope to show the relevance of these dialogues to current debates about Caribbean identity and to argue a case for the Caribbean as central to our definitions of hybridity and postcoloniality.