| Transatlantic Retrospections revisits eighteenth-century culture through the lens of creative works by contemporary African and Caribbean writers who engage with the modes of storytelling that emerged in England during the heyday of the Atlantic Slave Trade. While these engagements take different forms, they reveal that writers from once-colonized regions of the globe, despite their political differences, detect similarities between their own aesthetic struggles to represent a "new" world, yet one that continues to be traumatized by political conflict and violence, and the aesthetic struggles of Britons who were similarly confronted with a New World.;While postcolonial theorists and literary critics have typically viewed revisions of classic works within a counter-discursive framework of "writing back" to the British empire, focusing specifically on how they contest historical narratives promoting ethnocentrism and colonial exploitation, transatlantic retrospections expose that postcolonial writers are also interested in the eighteenth century's generic developments. For example: by transforming The Spectator No. 11 into a first-person captivity narrative, Inkle and Yarico, Guyanese-born Beryl Gilroy highlights Richard Steele's subtle abolitionist sentiment while critiquing the English periodical essay as a vehicle for identity constructions; by transforming Daniel Defoe's imperialist novel, Robinson Crusoe, into a play, Pantomime, St Lucian Derek Walcott (re)presents the colonizer/colonized, master/slave relationship as one that goes beyond subjugation and alienation; by transforming Jonathan Swift's satirical travelogue, Gulliver's Travels, into a prison memoir in verse, "Gulliver," Nigerian Wole Soyinka (re)introduces the figure of Gulliver as a prisoner of conscience and lone seeker after social justice; by transforming William Hogarth's pictorial series, A Harlot's Progress, into a neo-slave narrative, also entitled A Harlot's Progress, and drawing on Ignatius Sancho's Letters, Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative and Isaac Bickerstaff's The Padlock, Guyanese-born David Dabydeen demonstrates that no historical figure or cultural production represents a fixed socio-political position.;Transatlantic retrospections reflect twentieth-century encounters with neocolonial oppression and racism, and thus double as inquiries into how much the modern world has progressed since the eighteenth century. Moreover, they invite reinterpretations of eighteenth-century representations of colonialism and slavery. Subsequently, transatlantic retrospections exemplify the complex ways genres cut across historical periods and political and cultural systems. |
