JAMAICA’S DIFFICULT SUBJECTS JAMAICA’S DIFFICULT SUBJECTS NEGOTIATING SOVEREIGNTY IN ANGLopHONE CARIBBEAN LITERATURE AND CRITICISM SHERI-MARIE HARRISON THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS • CoLUMBUS Copyright © 2014 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Harrison, Sheri-Marie, 1979– author. Jamaica’s Difficult Subjects : Negotiating Sovereignty in Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Criticism / Sheri-Marie Harrison. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13 : 978-0-8142-1263-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Jamaican literature—History and criticism. 2. Sovereignty in literature. 3. Postcolonialism in literature. 4. Caribbean literature (English)—History and criticism. 5. Motion pictures—Carib- bean Area. I. Title. PR9265.05H37 2014 820.9'97292—dc23 2014013473 Cover design by Laurence J. Nozik Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Minion Pro Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American Na- tional Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For my parents, Audley C. Harrison and Esmin Harrison CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix INTRODUCTION • T he Politics of Sovereignty in Postcolonial West Indian Literary Discourse 1 CHAPTER 1 • “Who worked this evil, brought this distance between us?” Sex and Sovereignty in Sylvia Wynter’s The Hills of Hebron 33 CHAPTER 2 • “What you say, Elsa?” Postcolonial Sovereignty and Gendered Self-Actualization 69 CHAPTER 3 • “ No, my girl, try Bertha”: Race, Gender, Nation, and Criticism in Wide Sargasso Sea and Lionheart Gal 102 CHAPTER 4 • B eyond Inclusion, Beyond Nation: Queering Twenty-First-Century Caribbean Literature 142 Bibliography 181 Index 189 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS There is a passage in scripture about God’s care for Elijah that resonated with me throughout the process of writing and publishing this book. Unlike Eli- jah, I was not chased into the wilderness in fear of my life, but getting a first book published is hard. This was a long, often lonely, sometimes frustrating, and arduous journey that I could not have finished without incredible support networks. As with Elijah, the decision not to give up was often beyond me, and I would like to acknowledge those who for me embodied God’s grace and divine provision, whose various versions of “arise and eat” helped me make it from one end of this first-book wilderness to the next. In its infancy, this project was expertly guided by Sandra Pouchet Paquet, Lindsey Tucker, and Faith Smith, who each approached my work with inter- est and insight, all the while pushing me to refine my arguments and produce a specific yet contextualized project that could one day be a monograph. My intrepid dissertation advisor, Patricia J. Saunders, held my work to rigorous standards and questioned it at all stages—even post-defense when I spent three days rewriting the dissertation’s introduction at her dining room table. Pat taught me how to be a more precise and discerning scholar and I am grateful to call her my mentor, my colleague, and my friend. The Caribbean Literary Studies program at the University of Miami also played a significant role in my early critical formation. Its various symposia and conferences provided a community of Caribbeanists with whom I could • ix • x • ACKNowLEDGMENTS converse and who asked the clarifying questions about the earliest versions of this project. Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal and Modern Fiction Studies published early versions of chapters one and four, and I am grateful for permission to include the revised versions here. These are indeed difficult times in academic publishing, and the con- striction is felt acutely by those of us trying to publish first books. Moreover, attempting to publish a single-nation study proved more of a challenge than I expected. I feel lucky that Sandy Crooms took an interest in my project and never asked once for me to add the literature of another country to it. San- dy’s careful selection of reviewers also produced reader reports that dramati- cally transformed this project. The anonymity of their reports means I cannot thank them by name, but their contributions to framing every single worth- while thing in this book are invaluable, and I could not have asked for bet- ter interlocutors. Though Sandy did not see this book’s completion, Malcolm Litchfield and Lindsay A. Martin, along with their wonderful team, seamlessly managed the transitional process. I am especially grateful to Tara Cyphers and Rebecca S. Bender whose careful work brought uniform coherence to this book and all the texts it communicates with. This is no small feat for a book written by someone with an affinity for footnotes and multiple editions of the same books. The tenure track can be an overwhelming place for young academics, especially those of us a long way from home and family, but my truly excel- lent colleagues at the University of Missouri foster a supportive environ- ment in which their junior faculty can be productive. Senior colleagues like Anand Prahlad, Karen Piper, David Read, and Sam Cohen have been men- tors. Devoney Looser deserves special mention for helping me negotiate the rocky and treacherous terrain of manuscript proposals and for fielding more than her share of tears. I have also found great friends in my colleagues April Langley, Christopher Okonkwo, Alexandra Socarides, Anne Myers, and Mary Moore. April’s friendship meant that I was at home and had a sense of fam- ily in Missouri from day one; Chris encouraged me to own the controversial things I feel and have to say, and to say them loudly in print; Alex’s friendship and keen critical insights taught me how to turn a challenge into an opportu- nity and have shaped every facet of this project since the day it ceased being a dissertation; Anne’s timely invitations for non-work-related activities went a long way in offsetting many of the disappointments and discouragements that are inevitably a part of these projects; and time with Mary in her office or over long dinners also provided much-needed soul-sustaining respites. And then there are my nonacademic friends, mi people dem, di yaad mas- sive. These are the people who prayed, encouraged, offered to read things, and ACKNowLEDGMENTS • xi loved me through more than their fair share of my frustration—often from far away—while I worked on this project. In order of appearance: Teri-Ann Lawson, Micaela Wright, Lesley Chin-Ormsby, Kimberly Hall, Tanya Faugue, Andrea Shaw, Prudence Layne, Anna-Bo Chung-Emmanuel, Yoko Young Sang, Jason Lowe, Jason Wilkes, and Nadia Johnson. Finally, there are the people who are the salt that gives my life savor. Alli- son Harrison keeps my big head in check and teaches me new ways to be brave every single day. Lisa Harrison has said prayers for me when I would not say them for myself and supports me in consistently renewable ways, regardless. Esmin Harrison is the model of patience, perseverance, grace, and womanhood, to which I aspire in all things personal and professional. Aud- ley Harrison has sat with me for hours while I worked, urging “gwaan work man, soon finish” every time he sensed my need to hear it. Audley and Esmin are my Jamaican parents, who gave everything to their children, who by faith have always already seen our finish lines, and who have dared us to defy any perceived limitation in reaching them. If there are any trenchant observa- tions and critiques in this book, they are here because Andrew Hoberek asked many of the questions that yielded them. He also said the things that pro- duced much-needed laughter and did the things that communicated more about friendship and love than mere words can. Andy is my greatest inter- locutor, and this book would have been very different without his insight into all things Sheri. INTRODUCTION THE POLITICS OF SOVEREIGNTY IN POSTCOLONIAL WEST INDIAN LITERARY DISCOURSE Two disparate moments of confusion bracket Jamaica’s Difficult Subjects’ inquiry into the problems of sovereignty in the postemancipation, preinde- pendence, postindependence, and postindependence present contexts as they are portrayed in Jamaican novels, creative nonfiction, and films from the 1960s to the present. The first is my personal experience of reading John Crow’s Devil (2005) by Marlon James for the first time, and the second is the com- bination of events between August 2009 and June 2010 that led up to Chris- topher “Dudus” Coke’s extradition to the United States to answer charges of narcotics and weapons trafficking. On the surface, both events are united only in their late 2000s provenance. But nonetheless, each produced a multifac- eted experience of confusion and dissonance that illuminated both the lin- gering problems of sovereignty in the Caribbean’s postcolonial present and the limitations in our critical ability to fully interpret and understand these problems. Though Caribbean writing continues to actively engage with the problems of sovereignty in the postcolonial present, these limitations make it difficult to fully interpret the oppositional and subversive priorities of more recent Caribbean writing. Taken together, my experience of reading a novel and the events surrounding Coke’s extradition inform this book’s position at a crossroad between the contemporary shifts in Caribbean literary discourses and those within parallel critical paradigms like postcolonial, diasporic, and queer discourses. • 1 • 2 • INTRodUCTION This introduction is organized into five sections that cumulatively make the case for shifts in our literary practices, as occasioned by contemporary texts and events. The first section traces the development of Caribbean writ- ing in four waves,1 outlines how specific political impetuses during each wave facilitated consolidations and expansions in canon formation, and illustrates how the oppositional politics of each wave inadvertently elide some sub- jects and politics while validating and naturalizing others.