Lamming,George (Author) and Bogues,Anthony (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2011
Published:
Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
452 p., George Lamming is one of the best known, certainly one of the most highly regarded contemporary writers from the Caribbean. Spanning nearly 60 years and encompassing fiction, poetry and critical essays, Lamming's writing covers the length and breadth of Caribbean intellectual, cultural, political and literary life. Credited as a part of that group of Caribbean activists who awoke the Caribbean to its identity and more specifically to its cultural identity, his works have focused on finding new political and social identity.
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)
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
206 p, Synopsis Frontiers of Caribbean Literature in English features a series of original and comprehensive interviews with major Caribbean writers both male and female from different generations. Among these are Derek Walcott, George Lamming, Caryl Phillips and Jamaica Kincaid. Using informal interview techniques enables this history to appear both natural and informal. The extensive footnotes, however, supply details of extensive academic research showing how Caribbean literature reflects the varied experience of a region of diverse creed, race and culture. Among the highlights of the book are George Lamming's crucial lecture 'Concepts of the Caribbean' and the full text of Derek Walcott's 'The Sea is History' together with his comments on the poems. Frontiers in Caribbean Literature in English focuses on the critical issues of colonialism, and its affect on colour, class and sexuality. It provides a readable, lasting reference point for the study of Caribbean literature. (Amazon,UK);
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
233 p, Contents: Introduction. "Out of Many, One": A Case of Multiple Childhoods -- I. "The Ending Up Is the Starting Out": The Bildungsroman Re/formed -- II. "Behold the Great Image of Authority": African West Indian Male Initiation -- III. "His Great Struggle Beginning": African American Male Initiation -- IV. Womanish Girls: African American Female Initiation -- V. Journeys to Selfhood: African West Indian Female Initiation -- Conclusion. Ten Is the Age of Darkness -- Chronology of the African American Bildungsroman -- Chronology of the African West Indian Bildungsroman
