Faith Smith's analysis, in Creole Recitations, of the nineteenth-century scholar John Jacob Thomas's often contradictory allegiances offers us a way of reading the counterintuitively parallel career of the poet Eric Roach a century later. Roach is the subject of Laurence Breiner's monograph Black Yeats: Eric Roach and the Politics of Caribbean Poetry (2008). The positions Smith and Breiner ascribe to Thomas and Roach, respectively, articulate an enduring Caribbean contradiction between an aspiration to erudition on the one hand and the urgency of self-representation on the other. This essay argues that by obscuring the full range of Thomas' positions, which Smith's study so fully recuperates, and denigrating those same positions in Roach's work, which Breiner's study resuscitates, nationalist elites obfuscate their own connections to the full range of colonial and nationalist values by which they, too, have been influenced.
Apart from the fact that it is one of very few book-length studies of a Caribbean-based British Caribbean black intellectual from the nineteenth century, and one of even fewer written by a literary studies scholar, Faith L. Smith's Creole Recitations stands out because of the light it sheds on the mechanics of anglophone Afro-Caribbean intellectual formation, self-representation, and epistemology posited in newspapers, nonfiction books, and speeches produced in the Caribbean during this period. This article is a reading of a conceptual thread that runs through Smith's book—the ways in which the approaches to transnational engagement embedded within English colonialism are at once accepted, interrogated, or utilized by Caribbean public figures in the nineteenth century. As such, Smith's book provides a way for us to situate modern Caribbean studies within an intellectual genealogy and a model for contextualizing the issues, experiences, and approaches that began to be highlighted with the advent of postcolonial studies.
