McIntosh, Malachi (2010) "Home" : emigration, identity and modern Caribbean literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

Caribbean writing is an emigrant tradition. The first waves of native-born authors from the
region all spent significant portions of their lives abroad and, almost without exception, built
their fame upon the desires of metropolitan audiences for knowledge of their colonies.
Accordingly, the famous names of Lamming, Naipaul, Selvon, Césaire and Glissant are all
stamped with a slightly less famous departure date. While many critics have noted these
facts, there has been little sustained analysis of how the unique social positions and
preoccupations of emigrants have affected the works of these five writers or their peers. This
thesis is an attempt to address this issue. Its argument is that Caribbean emigrant authors
spoke from unique social and conceptual loci. Through detailed, comparative readings of
these five authors’ first major works, alongside considerations of their self-assessments,
critical opinion on their oeuvres, Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the literary field and Antonio
Gramsci’s theory of the organic intellectual, the argument advanced is that although these
authors actively positioned themselves, and were positioned by their readers, in such a way
that their emigrant status has had its importance elided, that status is present and potent in
their post-emigration works. While the concerns of these writers all altered over the course
of their careers, their early experiences of emigration shaped some of their most widely read
texts and resulted in a harmony between them that transcends the authors’ differing islands
of origin and their later thematic and political preoccupations.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PQ Romance literatures P Language and Literature > PR English literature
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	English literature -- Caribbean authors, French literature -- Caribbean authors, Caribbean Area -- Emigration and immigration
Official Date:	October 2010
Dates:	Date Event October 2010 Submitted
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	Papineni, Arathi ; Lazarus, Neil, 1953-
Extent:	260 leaves
Language:	eng

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