| The Caribbean Literary Movement in America, much like the Caribbean presence in America, has often been absorbed into the African American Literary tradition. The most noticeable evidence of this can be found in the Harlem Renaissance and in evaluating McKay's relationship to the movement. An eminent writer in his home country of Jamaica, McKay is recognized as one of the crucial figures of the Renaissance. McKay, however, is often read along with other writers of the period, without specific attention being paid to his Caribbean heritage and the problematic relationship between African Americans and Caribbean immigrants at that time. The Caribbean writer living in America has, in many ways, been co-opted into the African American literary space. The question this study addresses is how does the Caribbean writer renegotiate that co-optation? How does the Caribbean writer in America negotiate his/her identity notwithstanding the attempts by the dominant American culture and the Black American culture to co-opt the migratory subject? The Caribbean writer in America has positioned himself/herself as a transnational subject, maintaining both an American and a Caribbean awareness. The migratory subject is often identified as the exiled writer. The word exiled has a connotation that suggests that the individual belongs nowhere. Myriam Chancy ( Searching For Safe Places) suggests that the Caribbean migratory subject can no longer return home, while George Lamming (“The Occasion for Speaking”) has written, “…the dilemma of the West Indian writer abroad: that he hungers for nourishment from a soil which he could not at present endure” (17). These writers suggest that the migratory Caribbean subject is removed both from the home and the migratory space. It seems, however, that the literary subjects of texts written by Caribbean writers living in America, as well as the authors themselves, occupy both the American and the Caribbean space. My project proposes to evaluate the ways in which these writers thereby “belong” to, or claim, both places. This positioning, as transnational subjects, must constantly be negotiated; how do these writers contend with the external and psychological issues at stake?... |
