Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Traversing Trinidad's Wild West (1783–1907)
- 2 Peeping Through the Partition (1927–1936)
- 3 Dark Thresholds in the Colonial House (1934)
- 4 Challenge from the South (1935–1945)
- 5 The Sub-Urban Expansion (1940s–1950s)
- 6 From the Grass Roots to Woodford Square (1962–2010)
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Dark Thresholds in the Colonial House (1934)
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Traversing Trinidad's Wild West (1783–1907)
- 2 Peeping Through the Partition (1927–1936)
- 3 Dark Thresholds in the Colonial House (1934)
- 4 Challenge from the South (1935–1945)
- 5 The Sub-Urban Expansion (1940s–1950s)
- 6 From the Grass Roots to Woodford Square (1962–2010)
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
For a man's house is his castle, et domus sua cuique est tutissimum refugium.
(Edward Coke, The Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England [1644])For the protection of your person, and of a few feet of your own property, it is lawful for you to take life, on so much suspicion as may arise from a shadow cast on the wrong side of your wall. But for the safety not of your own poor person, but of sixteen thousand men, women, and children … [and] a province involving in its safety that of all English possessions in the West Indies—for these minor ends it is not lawful for you to take a single life on suspicion, though the suspicion rest, not on a shadow on the wall, but on experience of the character and conduct of the accused during many years previous.
(John Ruskin, “A Speech in London [1866]”)From the 1970s onwards, scholars have often argued that the revolutionary moment in Trinidadian literature took place in the 1930s. The Beacon group, which emerged in that decade from a coterie of Trinidadian writers, was perceived as an inspired, iconoclastic precursor to the internationally acclaimed 1950s generation of Caribbean writers. The 1930s therefore marked a new beginning in which Caribbean artists sought inspiration from local, creole culture and the common, “barefooted man”. However, post-1970s research, as has been discussed, has drawn attention to the Beacon group's occasional contradictions and conservatism, such as Alfred Mendes's devaluation of Africa's cultural wealth. The problematic schisms of the Beacon group add extra complexity to the historiography of Trinidadian literature and call for a closer reading of Port of Spain's literary geography. Rather than the monologic imposition of empire or the consistent march of progressive anti-colonialism, such contradictions act as a reminder of the fractious history and geography of the region. Mary Louise Pratt writes of the “contact zones … where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination”. Peter Hulme similarly elucidates, “no smooth history emerges, but rather a series of fragments, which read speculatively and hint at a story that can never be fully recovered”.
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- Information
- Between the BocasA Literary Geography of Western Trinidad, pp. 138 - 170Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2017