Abstract
Anglophone Caribbean writers traveled to Britain in two main waves, which roughly corresponded to phases of general migration. The major postwar wave arrived with scores of their countrymen in response to the widening of the boundaries of British citizenship by the 1948 Nationality Act. These writers gained recognition and respect as individuals and as a collective during the early to mid-1950s, and their ranks include V. S. Naipaul, Edgar Mittelholzer, George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, Andrew Salkey, Roger Mais, and John Hearne. The next major wave contained writers who joined a final surge of immigration from the mid- to late 1950s to the mid-1960s when a series of legislation, beginning with the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962, placed severe restrictions on colonial movement to the metropole. This second wave entered into and responded to a Caribbean literary scene that had already solidified and often leaned on the influence of the previous wave to find a place within it. They include the likes of Michael Anthony, Orlando Patterson, and Wilson Harris. Where the first group is notable for bringing writing from their territories and the Caribbean itself into the metropolitan frame, the second group is notable for the ways they advanced and supplemented the modes of representation established by their forbears.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
V. S. Naipaul, The Mystic Masseur (London: Andre Deutsch, 1957).
David Tylden-Wright, Times Literary Supplement, “Out of Joint,” May 31, 1957, p. 333.
David Tylden-Wright, Times Literary Supplement, “Street Scene,” April 24, 1959, p. 237.
On Selvon’s disconnection from the Indo-Caribbean Hindu culture that featured in his first novel, see his “Samuel Selvon: The Open Society or Its Enemies,” in Frontiers of Caribbean Literature in English, ed. Frank Birbalsingh (London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 54–67; and Kevin Roberts and Andra Thakur’s “Christened with Snow: A Conversation with Sam Selvon,” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 27 (1996), 89–115 (pp. 97–98, 105–6).
For inaccuracies in Selvon’s first novel, linked to his distance from Trinidadian Hindu culture, identified by some of his Indo-Caribbean readers, see Vahni Capildeo, “A Brighter Sun: ‘I Still Want to See How the Story Unfolds’—Conversations with a Novel,” Journal of West Indian Literature, 20 (2012), pp. 88–96. Errors stemming from a quest for the novelist’s access to the truth still occur, such as in Sukhdev Sandhu’s claim that Selvon was a Hindu “albeit not a very devout one” and, therefore, understood the role of rivers in Hindu religion and presented the Thames, in his London novels, with similar symbolic weight. Selvon was raised Christian. See Sandhu’s London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City (London: Harper Collins, 2003), p. 175.
Margaret Paul Joseph, Caliban in Exile: The Outsider in Caribbean Fiction (London: Greenwood Press, 1992), p. 10.
Bruce King, V. S. Naipaul (London: Macmillan, 1993), pp. 24, 28.
Roydon Salick, The Novels of Sam Selvon: A Critical Study (London: Greenwood Press, 2001), p. 2.
See Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays towards a Reflexive Sociology, trans. Matthew Adamson, rev. edn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), p. 141.
See Patrick French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul (Oxford: Picador, 2008), p. 144, for a succinct overview of this group.
George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (London: Michael Joseph, 1960), p. 225. Further references are cited in parentheses in the text.
See Alison Donnell, Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 16–32, for details of some of the conflict that took place in the Anglophone literary world from the late 1950s to the 1970s, including competition between home-based and emigrant authors.
Edward Brathwaite, “The New West Indian Novelists,” Bim, 32 (1961), 271–80 (p. 278);
Sandra Pouchet Paquet, “The Fifties,” in West Indian Literature, ed. Bruce King, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 51–62 (p. 52).
Reed Dasenbrock and Feroza Jussawalla, “Sam Selvon: Interview with Reed Dasenbrock and Feroza Jussawalla,” in Tiger’s Triumph: Celebrating Sam Selvon, ed. Susheila Nasta and Anna Rutherford (London: Dangaroo Press, 1995), pp. 114–25 (p. 118).
Sam Selvon, “Finding West Indian Identity in London,” in Displaced Persons, ed. Kirsten Holst Peterson and Anna Rutherford (Coventry: Dangaroo Press, 1988), pp. 122–25 (p. 123).
See Dasenbrock and Jussawalla, “Sam Selvon,” p. 118, for Selvon’s self-description, and Roydon Salick’s “Introduction,” in Samuel Selvon, A Brighter Sun (Harlow: Longman, 1985), pp. i–xv (p. iii), for the origins of A Brighter Sun.
Susheila Nasta, “An Unexpected Encounter with Sam Selvon at the National Portrait Gallery,” Wasafiri, 74 (2013), pp. 33–35.
John Theime and Alexandra Dutti, “‘Old Talk’: Two Interviews with Sam Selvon,” in Something Rich and Strange: Selected Essays on Sam Selvon, ed. Martin Zehnder (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2003), pp. 117–33 (p. 118).
Michel Fabre, “Sam Selvon: Interviews and Conversations,” in Critical Perspectives on Sam Selvon, ed. Susheila Nasta (Washington: Three Continents Press, 1988), pp. 64–76 (p. 67).
Supriya Nair, Caliban’s Curse: George Lamming and the Revisioning of History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), p. 6. Further references are cited in parentheses in the text.
Sandra Pouchet Paquet, Caribbean Autobiography: Cultural Identity and Self-Representation (London: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), p. 6.
A.J. Simoes da Silva, The Luxury of Nationalist Despair: George Lamming’s Fiction as Decolonizing Project (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), p. 31.
Landeg White, V. S. Naipaul: A Critical Introduction (London: Macmillan, 1975), p. 14.
Rob Nixon, London Calling: V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 4 and 11. Further references are cited in parentheses in the text.
For a reflection on critical trends and frequent repetition in analyses of Samuel Selvon, see Kenneth Ramchand, “The Other Servons,” Journal of West Indian Literature, 20 (2012), pp. 6–23.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 271–313.
Sudha Rai, Homeless by Choice: Naipaul, Jhabvala, Rushdie and India (Jaipur: Printwell, 1992), p. 6. Though it is an interesting study of the effects of emigration on writing, Rai’s book positions Naipaul primarily as an Indian/Hindu and does not adequately explore the author’s Caribbean context.
Copyright information
© 2015 Malachi McIntosh
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
McIntosh, M. (2015). Participant-Observers: Emigration, Lamming, Naipaul, Selvon. In: Emigration and Caribbean Literature. New Caribbean Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137543219_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137543219_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-55949-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-54321-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)