Owning up to the silence: Slavery in the Caribbean postmodern historical novel

The dissertation argues that contemporary Caribbean writers such as Caryl Phillips, Fred D'Aguiar, Maryse Conde and Michelle Cliff view the large-scale displacement of European, African and Native American peoples brought about by the Atlantic slave trade as the birth of a fragmented, postmodern New World subject whose national, ethnic and racial identities come into conflict with one another. The novels I analyze, among them Cambridge, Feeding the Ghosts, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem and Free Enterprise, invent apocryphal histories that explain but do not alter the course of actual events rather than looking to the past as a source of recoverable knowledge. These texts emphasize the instability and artificiality of the nation/state as a cultural construct and thereby question the absolute standards of racial or national purity implied by rigid categories. These novels celebrate individual choice as the only determinant in the fluid notion of identity.; My discussion of these texts is informed by Antonio Benitez-Rojo's reading of the Caribbean as one "repeating island," Stuart Hall's notions of new diasporic ethnicities, Patrick Chamoiseau's celebration of creole Caribbean cultures as well as James Clifford's theoretical analysis of "travel culture." I contend that Caribbean literary depictions of slavery have been split between those writers who favor discussing diaspora as an apt metaphor to describe the postcolonial condition and those motivated to inculcate a sense of creole pride in their respective islands. As such, they divide the world into two basic categories-travelers and dwellers. I propose a reading of these texts that recognizes how individual characters reject a diaspora identity in favor of a self-defined creole view of themselves. These novels present the development of a self-chosen cultural identity as the path to joining a global, or at least transnational, community. They celebrate the fluctuating and ephemeral qualities of personal choice and criticize the more static categories of racial or national determinism in the context of identity.