Lorna Down
Lecturer
Institute of Education
UWI, Mona

The Critical Tradition & the Fiction of Earl Lovelace

Issues of race, colour and class dominate the Caribbean critical tradition. Responding to western readings of Caribbean people, Caribbean critics have engaged in the revisioning and rewriting of limited depictions of a people’s identity. Such criticism has, through foregrounding the historical, political and social contexts, attempted to locate and define in more specific ways that identity. At the very least, these ‘new’ interpreters of the Caribbean have interrogated imposed/received definitions of identity, of place and of significance. They have provided new lens through which the Caribbean ‘reality’ may be read and have created a practice that has led to a more extensive understanding of the collective self. Yet such critical engagements by forever speaking to imperialist narratives – text and criticism- have become trapped in a dialogue with the west that repeats the centre/margin relation.

My aim, therefore, in this paper is to explore the gaps in the critical tradition, the spaces that allow for narratives other than the ‘colonial’ one. I argue that Earl Lovelace’s young men on the streets still wait for a language, a discourse ‘to free’ them from limiting definitions of a self, that is, of an identity forever shaped through opposition to the imperial powers. And underlying all of this is the question of the place of discourse, of a critical tradition in this space labelled ‘Caribbean’.