Caribbean lIterary production is being redefined in the wake of recent cahanges in the larger publishing houses that have traditionally published Caribbean literature. Macmillan Caribbean Writers, Launched in 2003 at the Calabash Literary festival in Jamaica, has opened its series with an impressive list of plubblications including new editions of Caribbean fiction from established writers, the Caribbean Classics series, which includes unplublished fiction and autobiograph7y from the nineteeth and early twentieth century, and new writting from as yet unplublished writers. Other very small Caribbean publishers such as Arawak and Twin Guinep continue to plublish reference works and some literary criticism, and the plublications lists of the University of the West Indies Press continues to grow; Introduction to Caribbean literary production.
This article, based on the 2003 Raphael Samuel Memorial Lecture, begins with the issue of memory, but also asks: what are the limitations of studying memory? I suggest that smuggled in to current memory studies are a range of issues which are, in fact, analytically distinct from the problem of memory itself: historical temporality, consciousness of time, and consciousness of history. Underlying all these distinct problems is the overarching question of how we can conceive of ‘the past’ existing in ‘the present’. I explore this in relation to two Caribbean thinkers. I look first at C. L. R. James’s monumental and wonderful history book, The Black Jacobins, which works closely within the Hegelian idea of ‘world-history’. An alternative conceptualization can be found in George Lamming’s more phenomenological approach, manifest most in his novel, In The Castle of My Skin. These two polarities – history on the world-stage, and history in subjective mode – continue to underwrite our understanding of the-past-in-the-present. I close by turning to the work of Raphael Samuel, and suggest that his celebrated volumes, Theatres of Memory, are more concerned with the-past-in-the-present than they are with memory itself. (Author)