Sandra Pouchet Paquet
Professor of English
University of Miami

Displacement, Diaspora, and Caribbean Geographies of Cultural Identity

In this paper I will explore specific issues arising out of displacement, diaspora, and Caribbean geographies of cultural identity. My point of departure is The Occasion for Speaking In George Lamming’s The Pleasures of Exile (1960), where he observes that, if the West Indian writer had taken up residence in America as Claude MacKay [sic] did, his development would probably be of a different, indeed, of an opposed order to that of a man who matured in England (24-25). I will focus on the transnational practices and imaginings of the Caribbean writer as nomadic subject in the USA and the shifting social conditions that enable flexibility in geographic and social positioning. How do individual writers negotiate the web of cultural meanings within the normative milieus of print capitalism in the USA? And how do regional institutions like The University of the West Indies, who have developed flexible notions of citizenship and sovereignty of their own, negotiate the cultural logics of subject-making that characterizes Caribbean literary culture in the USA and the Caribbean? What state and regional cultural rationalities make the very idea of a Caribbean literary culture practicable and even desirable? How does a loosely defined graduated state and regional sovereignty serve the decentering of print-capitalism and the accumulation of cultural capital within the Caribbean?