Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature: On the Edge

2012

Century Caribbean Literary Fictions identifies a late twentieth and twenty-first-century (1980-2007) creative literary trend that is characterized by applications of quasi-gothic and traditional gothic literary conventions and features in Caribbean fictions, and extensively investigates the historical, cultural and literary origins of each contributing aspect of this phenomenon. This dissertation analyzes the interactive relationship between knowledge and discourse and its discursive power in the formation of representation processes. I, then, trace the historical origins and literary genealogies of x gothic literature to mark the cultural and discursive connections between Western European and Caribbean literatures. In addition to this literary genealogy, I present a psychoanalytical analysis that configures a psychological profile to explain an overarching thematic emphasis on madness in gothic literature. I examine the Western European historical and cultural preoccupation with madness and its diagnoses, a trend that influenced the formations of many late medieval, early modern and modern Western European social norms, cultural systems, political institutions, philosophical notions, ideological principles and literary production. It is within the context of Europe's sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies' development of a "cultural madness" that I connect Western European literature and gothic literary conventions to the development of Caribbean literature. I illustrate how this concept of madness permeated the discursive process that constructed the Caribbean region and its inhabitants within preconceptions formed by the Western European Imaginary. I, then, illustrate how Caribbean manifestations of Western European "culture of madness" have been internalized by generations of Caribbean inhabitants and show how these conventions and features function to reveal the hidden, unspoken unspeakable in late twentieth and twenty-first-century Caribbean literary works. I contend that this literary trend allows Caribbean writers to rewrite Caribbean subjectivities on their own terms, negating those constructed by the European Imaginary, and to address the general invisibility that shrouds the region and its peoples in the midst of global neocolonial indifference and exploitation.

2008

6  Insane bodies ... 34  …insane minds 36  Occupational therapy 38  The inmates 40  Cannabis, Alcohol and Insanity 43  Insanity among East Indians 51 o The Royal Commission of Enquiry 54 o The Coolie, his Rights and Wrongs (1872) 56 o Lutchmee and Dilloo: the earliest novel of Indo-Guyanese life 58 Chapter 2: From history to stories 65 o Coolie imaginaries 66 o From past to present 69 o The Promise or After All We've Done For You (1995) 72 o The Counting House (1996) 81 Chapter 3: Oppression, repression and the madwoman 94 o Violence and Madness 95 o Harold Sonny Ladoo: the man/the writer 98

Caribbean Studies, 2014

race issues have been for a long time at the heart of our daily lives, and at how they interact in rather perverse ways with the ways in which the global economy shaped and shapes Puerto Rico's possibilities. In this context, the work of scholars like Dinzey-Flores becomes not only interesting but urgent, and the dominant sentiment and impulse as I close the book is to say Gracias, thank you for a sensible, smart and brave book, for helping the project and the conversations get started.

New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, 2015

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported (cc-by-nc 3.0) License.

Madness as a theme is very recurrent in the Caribbean literature. However, the term madness is not as simple to be defined particularly with reference to the Caribbean texts written in English between 1959 and 1980. These texts relate madness to more than one meaning. In this connection, Jean Rhys's novel Wide Sargasso Sea (WSS) presents a superb example, relating madness to various types of dilemma and delirium in a cross-racial Caribbean context. For this purpose, first of all, the related literature was reviewed on the concept of madness in light of the notions of three eminent critics and theorists, such as, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, and R. D. Laing. Next, the relevant discourses and incidents from WSS were analysed and interpreted in light of the aforementioned views on madness. On the basis of the analysis and discussion, it was concluded that, in WSS, Rhys relates madness to deep and varied meanings, that is, the search of identity, alienation, and split self (i.e., schizophrenia) on the part of Creole female colonized, the vengefulness, bruised nationalistic spirit, and collective delirium on the part of the Blacks, and the estrangement, schizophrenia, and an obsession of oppressive behaviour on the part of the White colonizers from the conservative, patriarchal Victorian culture of England.

Madness as a theme is very recurrent in the Caribbean literature. However, the term madness is not as simple to be defined particularly with reference to the Caribbean texts written in English between 1959 and 1980. These texts relate madness to more than one meaning. In this connection, Jean Rhys's novel Wide Sargasso Sea (WSS) presents a superb example, relating madness to various types of dilemma and delirium in a cross-racial Caribbean context. For this purpose, first of all, the related literature was reviewed on the concept of madness in light of the notions of three eminent critics and theorists, such as, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, and R. D. Laing. Next, the relevant discourses and incidents from WSS were analysed and interpreted in light of the aforementioned views on madness. On the basis of the analysis and discussion, it was concluded that, in WSS, Rhys relates madness to deep and varied meanings, that is, the search of identity, alienation, and split self (i.e., schizophrenia) on the part of Creole female colonized, the vengefulness, bruised nationalistic spirit, and collective delirium on the part of the Blacks, and the estrangement, schizophrenia, and an obsession of oppressive behaviour on the part of the White colonizers from the conservative, patriarchal Victorian culture of England.

Ex-centric Writing: Essays on Madness in Postcolonial Writing, ed. Susanna Zinato and Annalisa Pes, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013: 95-118

Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature: On the Edge (Palgrave), 2018

The authors’ post-print version of this article is available in open access at http://orbi.uliege.be/handle/2268/223148?locale=en

2024

Madness has had numerous expressions in literature and culture traversing the miles and centuries. While the Baul tradition (of Bengal) is internationally esteemed a legacy of the ‗mad minstrels'; the totems, relics and rites of various other parts of the