The Slave Sublime

Stacy J. Lettman

Description

In this interdisciplinary work, Stacy J. Lettman explores real and imagined violence as depicted in Caribbean and Jamaican text and music, how that violence repeats itself in both art and in the actions of the state, and what that means for Caribbean cultural identity. Jamaica is known for having one of the highest per capita murder rates in the world, a fact that Lettman links to remnants of the plantation era—namely the economic dispossession and structural violence that still haunt the island. Lettman contends that the impact of colonial violence is so embedded in the language of Jamaican literature and music that violence has become a separate language itself, one that paradoxically can offer cultural modes of resistance. Lettman codifies Paul Gilroy's concept of the "slave sublime" as a remix of Kantian philosophy through a Caribbean lens to take a broad view of Jamaica, the Caribbean, and their political and literary history that challenges Eurocentric ideas of slavery, Blackness, and resistance.

Living at the intersection of philosophy, literary and musical analysis, and postcolonial theory, this book sheds new light on the lingering ghosts of the plantation and slavery in the Caribbean.

Informations

• Publié par: The University of North Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 03 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781469668093
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The Slave Sublime
STACY J. LETTMAN
The Slave Sublime
The Language of Violence in Caribbean Literature and Music
The University of North Carolina Press    Chapel Hill
This book was published with the assistance of the Authors Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.
© 2022 Stacy J. Lettman
All rights reserved
Set in Arno Pro by Westchester Publishing Services
Manufactured in the United States of America
The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.
Complete Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available at https:// lccn .loc .gov /2021046366 .
ISBN 978-1-4696-6807-9 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4696-6808-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4696-6809-3 (ebook)
Cover illustration: Stafford Schliefer, Bars with Stripes and Spanish Jar (acrylic on canvas, 2004). Used by permission of the artist.
Portions of chapter 2 were previously published in a different form as “Freeing the Colonized Tongue: The Representation of Linguistic Colonization in Marlene Nourbese Philip’s and Eaven Boland’s Poetry,” in The Black and Green Atlantic: Cross-Currents of the African and Irish Diasporas , ed. Peter D. O’Neill and David Lloyd (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 131–45; and “Journeys to (Un)dis/cover Silence: A Critique of the Word in Looking for Livingstone,” Encounters: An International Journal for the Study of Culture and Society 5 (Fall 2012): 69–90.
For Savannah and Doris Lettman
Contents Acknowledgments INTRODUCTION The Slave Sublime: A Jamaican Case Study CHAPTER ONE A Trickster’s Challenge to Rationalism: Andrew Salkey’s Discourse of the Imagination in A Quality of Violence CHAPTER TWO Language and Social Death: Boundary Crossing and the Grammar of Violence in NourbeSe Philip’s Prose and Poetry CHAPTER THREE The Changing Same for I-an-I in Babylon: Bob Marley’s Representations of the Slave Sublime in Postcolonial Jamaica CHAPTER FOUR The Real (and) Ghetto Life: Excess Violence and Manichean Delirium in Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings CHAPTER FIVE The Ogun Archetype in Jamaican Dancehall Music: Harnessing Ogun’s Combative Will to Challenge Globalization’s Dionysiac Nature CODA Notes Bibliography Index
Illustration
1   The Treadmill, Jamaica, 1837    113
Acknowledgments
I’m thankful for the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) and grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that helped to kickstart my scholarly journey. Thanks also to the Florida Education Fund for the McKnight Junior Faculty Fellowship, which allowed for a one-year release from teaching and service at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) so as to focus on writing this book. I am thankful also to the Dorothy Schmidt College of Arts and Letters at FAU for the one-semester Scholarly and Creative Award Fellowship (SCAF) granting course releases from teaching that made possible the mental space to finish up the manuscript, albeit during the heights of the COVID-19 pandemic!
I am so appreciative of the wonderful enthusiasm and support that I received for this book project from David Lloyd, John Carlos Rowe, Karen Tongson, and Edwin Hill when it was just an idea. Along the way, as it materialized, I am grateful for the feedback that I received from my former colleagues and friends at the University of Central Arkansas, namely Clayton Crockett, Katelyn Knox, Taine Duncan, and Michael Kithinji. I am thankful also for the other friendships that were nurtured there with Sonia Toudji, Zach Smith, Lori Leavell, Melissa Smith, Melissa Eubanks, and Glen Jellenik. At FAU, I am equally grateful for the collegiality, friendship, and scholarly feedback from Carla Calarge, Ashvin Kini, Stacey Balkan, Sika Dagbovie-Mullins, Regis Fox, Kate Schmidt, Julieann Ulin, and Clevis Headley. I want to thank Eric Berlatsky for his tremendous support while serving as chair of the English department at FAU. My long-term friendships both inside and outside academia have been equally sustaining. Thank you Lori Moses, Sherleyne Zinn, Brian Zinn, Peter O’Neill, Ann Mackenna Mwenda, Allyson Salinger Ferrante, Mariko Dawson Zare, Jean Neely, Michael Cucher, Alicia Garnica, Priyanka Joshi, Vanessa Griffith Osborne, Nora Gilbert, and Debbie Harrigan. Thanks to my family for their support as well.
I am very thankful to the readers who provided such excellent feedback on my manuscript during the blind peer review stage at The University of North Carolina (UNC) Press. I am grateful also for the clear guidance from Lucas Church, my acquisitions editor, and others at UNC Press including Dylan White, Andrew Winters, Valerie Burton, and Elizabeth Ashley Orange for their assistance. I am also very thankful to Elaine Maisner for seeing the manuscript’s potential for becoming a book.
I would like to thank the University of the West Indies, Mona, for granting me access to their archives during my research trip to Jamaica. I am thankful to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City for access to their archival materials as well. Lastly, I am filled with gratitude for the mentorship that I received from Ashraf Rushdy, Monique Sulle, and Krishna Winston while I was an undergraduate student and MMUF Fellow at Wesleyan University where my scholarly endeavors began.
The Slave Sublime
INTRODUCTION The Slave Sublime
A Jamaican Case Study
Human progress is … an attempt to ritualize violence to protect the society’s members from mutual destruction. At present the world’s formerly colonized societies, regardless of the form of government, can hardly be said to have succeeded in this. Is it possible they contain more latent violence than other societies, which is reflected in their destructive and self-destructive behavior?
—Albert Memmi, Decolonization and the Decolonized
Albert Memmi’s rhetorical questions are pertinent to Jamaica, as the island is grappling with problems that stem from histories forged in the violent product of contact and systemic oppression under slavery and colonialism. Jamaica has been identified as having one of the highest per capita murder rates in the world. For many years this Caribbean island has consistently ranked third while Brazil, Columbia, South Africa, and Venezuela vied for first or second place, with the exception of the year 2005 when Jamaica actually ranked number one. 1 In fact, in a January 2006 article, the BBC referred to Jamaica as the “murder capital of the world.” 2 The violence in Jamaica has been attributed to the West Kingston garrison communities, created by politicians during the 1960s and 1970s to shape voting affiliation, which now function somewhat as autonomous, subnational entities ruled by dons (drug lords) because of structural neglect by the nation. 3 During the late 1970s and early 1980s Cold War era, the high influx of firearms into the country, partly engineered as a component of American destabilization of Jamaica’s social and political fabric through clandestine operations, along with huge loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and accompanying structural adjustments, had devastating effects on the country and further marginalized the West Kingston garrisons. Since the 1980s, the socioeconomically debased, Third World–esque slum and ghetto conditions in these garrison communities, manifesting in the high murder rates and other interpersonal violence, have been linked to the rise in illegal drug trafficking of cocaine from South America by heavily armed dons who are no longer subject to the authority of the government as they become part of a transnational network.
While these factors greatly contribute to the present problems, the cause has a deeper historical root, especially when one considers that other postcolonial nations in the Americas and Africa are also dealing with violence as a critical social problem. Strikingly resonant about these nations topping the list is one commonality: they all share histories of oppression stemming from slavery or European colonization to a newer form under globalization—neocolonialism, in other words. Given these considerations, this book explores the multifaceted histories and legacies of violence and its transnational formations in the Caribbean—Jamaica in particular.
This interdisciplinary project investigates how Jamaica’s legacies of violence are socially articulated in literary and musical texts that reflect upon slavery and its more contemporary manifestations in the era of globalization. Moreover, it illustrates how the violence from the plantation era is now reimagined materially as a means of prolonging slavery into newer forms of oppression. Imperial nations maintain dominance over postcolonial nations such as Jamaica, where there is a refiguration of “social death” and economic dispossession as structural violence that replicates, mirrors, or refigures the slave plantation system. In this book, I look at various forms of cultural production including music, poetry, and novels in order to show how musical artists and writers represent the current iterations of plantation systems, all deeply structured by violence—similar to the way that a language is structured by grammar. I use the term slave sublime to contextualize the infinite violence that the imagination endures by discussing the antithetical ideas of change and sameness . I am indebted to Paul Gilroy’s coinage of the term in The Black Atlantic . Although Gilroy leaves the term slave sublime undefined, within the context of Jamaica’s transhistorical violence I use it to foreground the overwhelming magnitude of awe stemming from unrelenting violence, which, nonetheless, does not override the imagination’s ability for representation. 4
As I argue, for the historical and contemporary slave, the sublime is not only a bodily experience, but also one in which the imagination interiorizes terror—wherein the terror associated with the sublime remains ever-present without transcendence throug