Nationalism and Identity: Culture and Imagination in a Caribbean Diaspora

by Stefano Harney

Overview

The nation-state of Trinidad and Tobago offers a unique case for the study of the forces and ideologies of nationalism. This book reveals how this ethnically diverse nation of people of African, East Indian, Syrian, Chinese, Portuguese, French and English descent has provided fertile ground for the creative tension between the imagination of the writer in his or her search for a habitable text of identity and the official discourse on nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago. Stefano Harney examines the changes and influences on the sense of nationalism and peoplehood caused by migration and the ethnicization of migrant communities in the metropoles.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789766400163
Publisher:	University of the West Indies Press
Publication date:	01/28/1996
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d)

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION
Reading the Nation
Post-Colonial Theory
Theories of Nationalism
Caribbean Studies
Readings of Trinidad
Trinidad Imagined
Readings of the Caribbean
Reading Literary History

Beyond Nationalism: Literary Nation-building in the Work of Earl Lovelace and Michael Anthony
Dilemmas of Literary Nationalism
Class Struggle and Anti-Colonial Struggle
The Struggle for the Trinidadian
The Independent Imagination in the Independent Nation
The Practice of Peoplehood

Men Go Have Respect For All O' We: Valerie Belgrave's Invention of Trinidad
Inventing the Mixed Nation
The Metadiscourse of Race
The Counter-discourse of Class
History against Itself
Nationalism without Equality
Inventing the Rules of Class
Mistresses to the National Body

Willi Chen and Carnival Nationalism in Trinidad
Chinese Text of Identity
Nation of Imagi-nations
An Indian Text of Identity
Nation as Street Theatre
Theories on Containing Chen
Chen's Carnival

Samuel Selvon and the Chronopolitics of a Diasporic Nationalism
Selvon Rediscovered Discovering Trinidad
The Challenge of Trinidadian Identity
Challenging the Sociology of Race Relations in Britain
The Chronopolitics of Creolization
Predatory Creolization

Neil Bissoondath and Migrant Liberation from the Nation
The Nation Abandoned
The Uninhabitable Text of the Nation
The Politics of Imagined History
Canada Re-imagined

VS. Naipaul and the Pitfalls of Nationalism
Dissent in the Nationalist Project
The Janus Face of Nationalism
Reading Internal Oppression
Reading Revolutionary Grenada
Reading Naipaul as a Counter-revolutionary
Inventing the Nationless Cosmopolitan
The South–South Cosmopolitan
Nationalism as Dependency Theory

C.L.R.James and Egalitarian Nationalism in the Caribbean
An Alternative Nationalist Project
Caribbean History Regained
'The Supreme Artist'
James as National Artist
The Nationalist Project Begun
The Artist as Product of the People
The Nation as Product of the People

CONCLUSION: Mud Mas: Playing Identity

REFERENCES
INDEX