Beyond Caliban: (Dis)forming identity and being in contemporary anglophone Caribbean literature

"Beyond Caliban" is a critical inquiry into debates about identity and Being which have been constructed through historical conventions and the artistic imagination in Anglophone Caribbean literature. These debates include the anti-colonial "Quarrel with History" frequently symbolized by Caliban which, though it contests imperial acts of history, concurs that 1492 is the point of departure for Caribbean History. I assert that the Calibanesque tradition has blocked analysis of the construction and categories of history and identity in Caribbean literature.;Chapters One and Two challenge the Caliban trope through post-Prospero constructions of history. In Chapter One I assert that literary magazines like Trinidad and The Beacon offer alternative modes of historical representation through narratives that deploy such counter-cultural modes of representing history and "reality" as obeah and local idioms. In doing so, these narratives are freed from the "facticity" of History and can address the subject's translation of events into imaginative representations. Chapter Two examines George Lamming's Water with Berries as a text which highlights the absence of women in the Calibanesque tradition. Lamming's evocation of the Haitian Ceremony of Souls exposes these constructed silences while critiquing the privileged position of verbal signification for instituting presence in Quarrel with History narratives. His deployment of non-verbal signification creates alter/native modes of interpreting silenced historical narratives. Chapter Three examines counter-narratives which translate silences in representations of history. Marlene Nourbese Philip's prose-poem She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks and Erna Brodber's novel, Louisiana, critique disciplinary discourses of anthropology, science, law and history and the institutionalization of existential, linguistic, sexual, and racial oppression. Louisiana offers an alternative to the Quarrel with History by revising the categories of history and "reality:" it constructs a political theory of metaphysics which draws its authority from the possibilities, not the limitations, of the imagination.