UCLA

“Representing Radical Politics in Anglophone Caribbean Literature After Independence” examines the depiction of black radicalism across multiple works by V. S. Naipaul, Sam Selvon, Merle Collins, and Earl Lovelace—the first writers of fiction to address the emergence of Black Power in the Caribbean. These authors repurpose, expand, and revise their portraits of Caribbean resistance movements in the wake of decolonization and in so doing betray the limitations inherent in the literary forms that their representations take. I argue that reading these authors alongside each other illuminates a myriad of formal difficulties that prevent Afro-Caribbean revolutionary struggle from being portrayed as something other than mere mimicry of Anglo-American forms. When read in turn, each author illustrates the evolving search for a form amenable to the fictive depiction of a radical politics indigenous to black West Indian culture. Collectively, their works either manifest or challenge the inability to recognize the uniquely Caribbean relationship of blackness to radicalism due to the region’s politics being seen until the 1980s as imitating or secondary to British or African American modes. The dissertation finds that, respectively, the authors’ testing of literary forms moves from mimicry to parody to allegory before culminating in Lovelace’s most recent novel, Is Just a Movie (2011), a work of historiographic metafiction that spotlights the representation of Caribbean Black Power as parodic only to dismantle that interpretation as myopic. The focus of my dissertation on the literature of black radicalism in Trinidad, Grenada, and the U.K. makes an important contribution to the field of Caribbean Studies in its demonstration of how literary forms bring into representation a global Black Power Movement that is thought to have failed as a viable political enterprise in the West Indies. It shows how Collins’s and Lovelace’s complex interpretations of Caribbean Black Power counter and broaden Naipaul’s and Selvon’s oversimplifications of the movement.