Chapter 11 - Postcolonial Stirrings

Summary

The rise of Rastafari in popular consciousness and the 1968 Rodney disturbance in Jamaica, the 1970 Black Power revolution in Trinidad, and a range of leftist political parties emerged to challenge the post-independence status quo. The 1979 overthrow of Eric Gairy’s government in Grenada, by the New Jewel Movement (NJM) – a party of young, black radical intellectuals and activists – was yet another example of how the earlier independence models were being challenged, and in some cases completely dismantled. This chapter examines literary works by Merle Hodge, Earl Lovelace, and V. S. Naipaul, to analyse how anglophone Caribbean writers addressed questions around the unfinished business of independence. I also discuss work by Walter Rodney, Derek Walcott, and Sylvia Wynter. Their work represents many of the key formal, thematic, and philosophical experiments that define the literature of this period. I call the unfinished business these authors describe ‘postcolonial stirrings’, where stirrings means disorder and ferment. Concentrating on four themes that surface across the field – nation language, Black Power, history and literature debates, and radicalism in crisis – I mark the end of the radical 1970s in the Caribbean as 1983 with the end of the Grenada Revolution and the collapse of the NJM.