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"When you take thing out the earth and you en't put nothing back" : nature, form and the metabolic rift in Jan Carew's Black Midas
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Niblett, Michael (2011) "When you take thing out the earth and you en't put nothing back" : nature, form and the metabolic rift in Jan Carew's Black Midas. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Vol.46 (No.2). pp. 237-255. doi:10.1177/0021989411404990 ISSN 0021-9894.
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0021989411404990
Abstract
This article examines Jan Carew's 1958 novel Black Midas and its mediation of the environmental legacies of the colonial penetration of Guyana. I suggest that the ecological changes wrought by the forcible integration of the Caribbean into the capitalist world-system constitute a "trauma" that, like the traumas of slavery and the decimation of the indigenous peoples, haunts literary texts from the region. The article focuses in particular on the impact of what John Bellamy Foster, following Marx, calls the metabolic rift - the rupture in the interaction between human beings and the earth caused by the antagonistic relationship capitalism sets up between town and country, or metropole and colony. I argue that the generic discontinuities and formal quirks of Carew's novel can be read as mediating the structural limits to development imposed by ecological imperialism and the metabolic rift, the dynamics of which imprint themselves on the aesthetics of the text.
| Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Subjects: | P Language and Literature > PR English literature | ||||
| Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > English and Comparative Literary Studies > Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies | ||||
| Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Carew, Jan R. -- Criticism and interpretation, Imperialism in literature, Ecology in literature | ||||
| Journal or Publication Title: | The Journal of Commonwealth Literature | ||||
| Publisher: | Sage Publications Ltd. | ||||
| ISSN: | 0021-9894 | ||||
| Official Date: | June 2011 | ||||
| Dates: |
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| Volume: | Vol.46 | ||||
| Number: | No.2 | ||||
| Page Range: | pp. 237-255 | ||||
| DOI: | 10.1177/0021989411404990 | ||||
| Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||
| Publication Status: | Published |
Data sourced from Thomson Reuters' Web of Knowledge
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