norval edwards, "'talking about a little culture': sylvia wynter's early essays"

7/22/2019 Norval Edwards, "'Talking about a Little Culture': Sylvia Wynter's Early Essays"

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"TALKING ABOUT A LITTLE CULTURE": SYLVIA WYNTER'S EARLY ESSAYSAuthor(s): Norval EdwardsSource: Journal of West Indian Literature, Vol. 10, No. 1/2, Sylvia Wynter: ATransculturalist Rethinking Modernity (November 2001), pp. 12-38Published by: Journal of West Indian Literature, Department of Literatures in English, University ofthe West IndiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23019778.

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TALKING ABOUT A LITTLECULTURE : SYLVIA WYNTER'SEARLY ESSAYSNorval Edwards

Sylvia Wynter, the Jamaican writer and cultural theorist, emerged inthe first decade of independence as a significant Caribbean intellectualwhose early essays substantively intervened in the contentious culturaland aesthetic debates of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In these essays,characterized by sophisticated theoretical acumen, referential andallusive density, and a blistering polemical style, Wynter challengedextant norms of Caribbean literary criticism and called for a criticalpractice grounded in a dialectical understanding of the historical andcultural relations, categories, and structures that produced Caribbeansocieties, culture, writing, and criticism. The significant impact of herwork on her peers can be gauged in Kamau Brathwaite's ringingendorsement of her first major essay, We Must Learn to Sit DownTogether and Talk About a Little Culture: Reflections on West IndianWriting and Criticism. For Brathwaite, this essay exemplifies anindigenist critical practice: This piece is one of our great criticallandmarks: a major essaiin literary ideas, and the first to be written in theWest Indies. 1 Brathwaite's emphasis on the importance of ideas inWynter's work is reiterated in Paget Henry's description of Wynter as anintellectual diva whose playful elaborations of very serious ideas canonly be compared to the exquisitely decorated notes of Sarah Vaughan'ssinging. She is in so many ways the Divine One of Caribbean letters. 2

Despite these plaudits, Wynter's cultural criticism has received scantcritical attention over the years. While there are welcome signs of a

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renewal of interest in her work, the relative neglect of this formidableintellectual has deprived Caribbean literary scholarship of a seriousengagement with a provocative and original body of ideas ranging fromcultural nationalism to Foucaultian-inflected postmodernism.Wynter's itinerary is a fascinating example of both a rich intellectualbiography and the larger narrative of the relationship between local andglobal theories. In fact, Wynter's turn toward postmodernism is markedby the strategic requirements of her engagement with the foundingdiscourses of modernity and our contemporary global order. LikeAntonio Benitez-Rojo and Edouard Glissant, she explicitly usespostmodernist strategies to read the Caribbean but her theoreticalaffinities recall Foucault rather than Deleuze. Her focus is on thepolitics of knowledge and the instrumentality of cognitive and culturalcategories in effecting regimes of truth. This focus pervades all of heressays, from the early cultural nationalist interventions on Caribbeanwriting, culture, and criticism, to the later attempts to theorize agenealogical and deconstructive critique of humanism. Regardless ofher subject matter, Wynter maintains a consistent theoretical goal,namely the dismantling of the conceptual foundations of Westernhumanism, the disruptive deciphering of the epistemological andcognitive categories that initiated and legitimized the West's globaldominance. For Wynter, the West's hegemonic self-conception,globalized as the veritable form of human reality, constituted as theWord of Man , and inscribed within the body's own neural circuits asgoal inducing affective stimuli, becomes a meta-narrative that traps theWest's Others within an ordained logic of cultural, political, andeconomic marginality. This thesis (explicated in detail and buttressedby an erudite and original synthesis of concept from a dizzying array ofdisciplines) is reiterated in all of Wynter's post-1976 essays, and it is herdistinctive contribution to Caribbean intellectual thought.

Paget Henry sees Wynter's ideas as a poststructuralist bridgebetween contending approaches to history in Caribbean philosophy, buthis focus on her later poststructuralist phase precludes detailed scrutinyof the early essays which established Wynter's reputation as a

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formidable partisan in the contentious culture wars of the late sixtiesand seventies. Given the growing recognition of Wynter's contributionto Caribbean and Africana cultural criticism, it is necessary to revisit theearly writings which anticipated the later poststructuralist critique ofWestern humanism. At the end of the millennium, in an academicclimate that is sceptical if not averse to the heady cultural nationalism ofthe era of decolonization, Wynter's early writings afford us insight intothe theoretical possibilities as well as the pitfalls of West Indian nativistcriticism in the first decade of independence. The scope of Wynter'sinterventions, her synthesis of a variety of theoretical and disciplinaryapproaches, and her systematic emphasis on the historicity of culturalcategories counter the contemporary tendency to regard culturalnationalism as invariably wedded to revanchist and ahistoricalessentialist ideologies.The early essays evince a concern with clearing the ground for aCaribbean critical practice that engages with the historical and culturalrelations, the social framework, and the systemic categories thatunderpin literature, culture, and criticism. This categorical imperativeresonates throughout the five major essays published in the period 196872, and it lays the groundwork for the rigorous philosophical critique ofhumanism that characterizes her later essays. Wynter's major conceptssuch as the advocacy of a poetics of disenchantment, the emergence ofWestern humanism in the context of colonial expansion and plantationslavery, and the power of cognitive models to structure societal andhistorical processes, are first formulated in this period, but they lack thesystematic conceptualizing and the philosophical density of the secondphase essays. In this first phase, Wynter assaults a range of conceptualpieties extant in Caribbean society: for example, in a Jamaica Journalarticle on Lady Nugent, she attacks the post-independence myth ofracial harmony as a symptom of the society's refusal to confront itshistory and to accept the African cultural presence which provided thesyncretic mixing force of the society. 3 This idea of a repressed historicaland cultural relation, whose retrieval is a prerequisite for critical




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practice, becomes the point of departure for Wynter's subsequentcritical explorations.A common theme in all five essays is the critique of notions ofaesthetic autonomy and the disinterested objectivity of criticism.Wynter's impatience with aesthetic idealism underwrites her movefrom the literary-critical concerns of We must learn to sit downtogether and talk about a little culture: Reflections on West IndianWriting and Criticism (1968/69) to her ethnological study, Jonkonnuin Jamaica, which reads the Jonkonnu folk dance as a cultural sitewhich registers the various strata of cultural encounters, adaptations,and re-inventions attendant on the indigenization of Africans in theNew World. The critical concerns of Reflections are rehearsed inCreole Criticism: A Critique , a blistering polemic directed at KennethRamchand's seminal study, The West Indian Novel and Its Background.Novel and History: Plot and Plantation outlines the relationshipbetween history and fiction in the Caribbean in terms of the relationbetween Caribbean modernity and the rise of the novel, and a

structuring ambivalence generated by the opposition between the elite(plantation) and the folk (plot) worldviews. The last major essay of thisphase, One Love: Rhetoric or Reality?- Aspects of Afro-Jamaicanism(1972) is a frank critique of the co-opting of popular cultural styles andargot by an emergent Black middle class. Wynter warns against thedangers of this class exercising a false populism to consolidate powerwithin the old framework of colonial values. One Love's excoriationof racial romanticism reveals Wynter's commitment to understandingculture and history in terms of the foundational concepts and cognitiveaxioms that determine cultural and historical outcomes. Her focus oncognitive determinism underscores her rejection of a facile racialsolidarity as the touchstone for evaluating cultural production.4From the outset, therefore, Wynter's work highlights the systemicfactors that can enable or prevent particular forms of historical agency.The making of history, as she subsequently argues, cannot be separatedfrom our culturally produced models of history and the nature of theliminal categories that define and demarcate the horizons of thought

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and act. This concept recurs throughout her oeuvre in a series offormulations and rhetorical figures that emphasize the instrumentalfunction of rhetorical and signifying conventions in producing cognitivemodels.

All of the above concerns and concepts are apparent in Wynter'smordant polemic, We must learn to sit down together and talk about alittle culture: Reflections on West Indian Writing and Criticism. Theessay is a polemical riposte to the critical norms expressed by a variety ofWest Indian and English critics associated with the Mona campus of theUniversity of the West Indies. In particular, Wynter takes issue withWayne Brown's article, The Novelist in an Unsettled Culture , theLouis James edited anthology of critical essays on West Indianliterature, The Islands in Between, and Bill Carr's essay on Roger Mais,Roger Mais: Design From a Legend. Brown, James, Carr, andseveral contributors to The Islands in Between, are castigated for

perpetuating a branch plant model of criticism characterized by itsimitation of English critical norms. Wynter's focus is not on colonialmimicry per se but on the systemic factors, historical and culturalconnections, and the ideological and conceptual categories that shadowseemingly objective judgments.For Wynter, the colonial relation, articulated in terms of exile, is thesystemic ground and context of Caribbean writing and criticism. Thebranch plant model of criticism, in espousing metropolitan norms asuniversal truths, fails to see its own historical and socio-culturalformations, the interwoven connections that link Caribbean writers,critics, and institutions like the University of the West Indies, to theirmetropolitan counterparts. Wynter uses Fanon's technique of asociodiagnostic to give a symptomatic reading of the criticalmanifestations of branch plant blindness, and she augments the

diagnosis with prescriptive declarations that point to excluded folk andpopular cultures as sources and possibilities of a postcolonial Caribbeanaesthetics.

Wynter's premises, in Reflections , develop from a synthesis ofvarious theoretical positions, a constellation of unlikely alignments and




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encounters that sees her blending George Lammmg's Calibamc readingof The Tempest with Theodor W. Adorno's Frankfurt School culturecritique. Lamming's The Pleasures ofExile underpins her reading of thecolonial relation, while Adorno's dialectical critique of culture providesa conceptual map for charting a non-positivist rethinking of the conceptsof culture, criticism, and the aesthetic.5 Wynter uses Adorno, as well asBertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin, to articulate a criticalhermeneutics that is absent from the inherited Anglo-Americantradition of literary scholarship. The Frankfurt School technique ofcontinually questioning founding premises and assumptions allowsWynter to dispute what she sees as the aestheticism and formalism thatunderpin the critical pronouncements of James, Carr, and Brown.Wynter, in fact, reads literature and criticism as merely aspects of alarger discourse of culture, and she champions a critical practice thatmoves beyond conventional literary criticism toward socio-culturalanalysis.

Wynter's arguments, m this lengthy two-part essay, move from theintroduction of major concepts and concerns in Part One to the criticalreadings of fiction and criticism in Part Two. Part One's generalpropositions overtly challenge the extant orthodoxy of criticism issuingfrom the University of the West Indies, whereas Part Two illustratesWynter's own critical practice. Throughout the essay, Wynter definescriticism as a social practice (subject to ideological, cultural, andhistorical claims) rather than as an exercise in aesthetic evaluation. Butthe real power of her argument lies in her repeated call for a dialoguebetween Prospero and Caliban, plantation and plot, metropole andcolony, elite and folk, writer and critic, as a prerequisite for meaningfulcriticism. Her injunction that we must learn to sit down together andtalk about a little culture provides a major trope of culture as aconversation, and of criticism as a conversation about culture. In thisdialogic trope, she proposes, like other Caribbean critics, and longbefore Mikhail Bakhtin became fashionable, an analytical paradigmthat can recuperate all of the Caribbean's conflicting relations, cultures,and histories, for the purpose of rethinking culture and criticism.

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Dialogue becomes the site for staging a series of conflictual and creativeencounters and relations that constitute the cultural grammar ofCaribbean writing nd criticism.

Wynter's dialogic model is theoretically indebted to GeorgeLamming's assertion of dialogue as the enabling precondition of psychicand cultural awareness for all the parties involved in the colonialrelation. The dialogic, relational, and revisionist design of Lamming'sThe Pleasures of Exile impels Wynter to accord Lamming the highesthonours as a critic. Her repeated references to his fiction and criticism,especially in the first part of the essay, acknowledge him as anintellectual precursor. Lamming's reading of the colonial relation asconstituted by exile also becomes a central concept in Wynter'sargument. The dialogic and exilic paradigms are deployed in acontrapuntal relationship; thus dialogue offers a way out of thedebilitating exile of the colonial condition. Wynter's assertions areframed within the terms of Lamming's revisionist reading of TheTempest: the insistence on the reciprocity of decolonization anddemythologization; and the injunction that Caliban must, in adialogue, re-invent, re-define the relation. 6

For Wynter, such dialogic redefining of the colonial relation involvesa conceptual re-positioning of the Caribbean within the history ofmodernity. Like C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, and George Lamming,Wynter reads colonial exile as a historically constituted condition that iscoeval with the onset of capitalist modernity. Caribbean exile is thusthe original model of the twentieth-century disruption of man. Theenslaved African populace in the Caribbean was also the first labourforce that emergent capitalism had totally at its disposal. We anticipatedby a century the dispossession that would begin in Europe with theIndustrial Revolution. We anticipated, by centuries, that exile, which inour century is now common to all. 7The above statements highlight Wynter's affiliation with aCaribbean intellectual tradition which has consistently locatedcolonialism, slavery, race, and empire as constitutive features ofmodernity and the very notion of the West. This is James's theme




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throughout his wide ranging oeuvre, and it is also the conceptualpremise of Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery. Wynter's particularcontribution lies in her extrapolation of the material and economicentanglements of European capitalism and the enslavement of Africansinto the cultural cognitive, and symbolic domain, the very arena of selfinvention. The concrete historical and social realities are read as thematerial precursors for the emergence of new cognitive modes andidentity categories. This formulation is evident in her castigation ofLouis James and Bill Carr as English critics of Caribbean literature whofail to recognize the common historical process that has resulted in boththeir presence at the University of the West Indies, and the exile ofCaribbean writers in the metropole. By positing mutual connectionswithin a historical relation that simultaneously produces both Prosperoand Caliban, Wynter highlights the ways in which history and culturemediate writer and critic. To refuse to see this mediation is to acquiesceto the colonial status quo; to see it is to question the imputed fixity ofhistorical determinants, and thus offer a vision of transformation.

Wynter's essay stresses the conceptual importance of a critic's choiceof model. Her argument sets them up as manichean polarities, starklyopposed perspectives and practices that highlight criticism's relation tothe status quo. The dichotomy of acquiescent versus challengingcriticism is indebted to Adorno's distinction between transcendentaland immanent criticism.8 Acquiescent criticism is synonymous withbranch plant criticism and aesthetic formalism, whereas challengingor authentic criticism is a means to the desired end of launching arevolutionary assault against the distorted and inauthentic reality of

commodity capitalism. Wynter uses a rhetoric of insurgency and crisisto define challenging criticism. Hence her assertion that to write at allfor the West Indian was and is a revolutionary act. Any criticism thatdoes not start from this very real recognition is invalid (31). Thissweeping prescription clearly excludes most of the extant criticism ofCaribbean literature, but it is ultimately a position statement aboutWynter's own perception of her emergent cultural theory. The latter,premised on conceptual insurgency as a precondition for a Caribbean

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poetics, advocates an engagement with the folk and popular cultures,the repressed relation in the colonial dialectic, in order to dismantle theinherited cognitive norms of empire.

Wynter designates the cognitive norms derived from colonialism andwestern culture as forms of enchantment, bewitchment, and culturalsorcery. This appellation is derived from three sources: Lamming'sreading of Western culture as analogous to Prospero's magic; Adorno'scritique of commodified mass culture fed to a humanity which has beenenchanted and transformed into clientele by the suppliers ; and Sartre'sstatement, in his preface to Fanon's The Wretched ofthe Earth, regardingthe witchery of Western culture. The motif of enchantment recursthroughout this essay, and it becomes a signature concept in all ofWynter's subsequent work. In fact, Wynter contends that the writersand critics such as V.S. Naipaul, Wayne Brown, and others, areenthralled by the brilliant myth of Europe. On the other hand,challenging criticism is marked by its attempt to disenchant the illusoryspell cast by a commodified reality. Such disenchanted awareness leadsto a reinterpretation of reality which can subvert the racialized orderingof the latter. This focus on the inscription of race in the colonial relationconstitutes a crucial strategy for Wynter's poetics of disenchantment.It is in this early essay that Wynter initiates a reading of race as acultural construction that is experienced in relational terms. Herargument is framed in terms of Lamming's influential reading of TheTempest as a metaphor of the colonial relation, C.L.R. James's epicrendition of Afro-Caribbean revolutionary nationalism, and Fanon'spropositions on race and colonialism. Wynter reads race in terms of thematerial and cultural practices of colonialism and the cultural mythsthat legitimize European superiority and the inferiority of thosedesignated as natives. These cultural myths, Wynter argues, alsoinflect West Indian literature, hence the need for a challenging criticalpractice that highlights the deterministic nature of history and culture inthe colonial experience. For Wynter, the exemplary critic is GeorgeLamming who, unlike Louis James and Bill Carr, contests the statusquo: Lamming, the questioning critic cannot take fixity as his stance;




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he knows himself and his perspective moulded by a historical processimposed on his being. He writes from a point of view inside the process.He knows that he does. Awareness is all (27).

By insisting on the entanglement of writer and critic in the material,cognitive, and cultural practices of the society, Wynter redefines writingand criticism as modes of socio-cultural definition with far reachingcognitive consequences: I believe that this definition is the beginning ofawareness: the 'taking of consciousness' of being, as modern LatinAmerican writers express it (24). This insistence on demystifiedawareness of social reality permeates Reflections , and underscoresWynter's departure from orthodox Marxist base - superstructure modelswhich subordinate ideology to material conditions of production. ForWynter, economic and social models are predicated on particularcultural and ideological norms, hence her unrelenting focus on cultureas the means of both enchantment and disenchantment. As she argues,following Adorno, the twentieth century revolution must be a culturalone (42). She also chastises Caribbean intellectuals, particularly thesocial scientists associated with the New World School, for failing toadequately address the cultural distortion imposed on the region, afailure highlighted by the fact that these same intellectuals had attackedthe distortion caused by metropolitan economic domination of theCaribbean.

Reflections ends with Wynter's clarion call for a veritablecognitive insurgency that can awaken Caribbean intellectuals to a newawareness of our paradox , an awareness which should be diffusedthrough praxis rather than sermonizing rhetoric. Such awareness, sheavers, demands a recognition of the need for Caribbean academic andcultural institutions to provide a space for writers and creative artists tobridge the gap between academia and the popular cultural imaginary,the invisible heart of the nation (41).In Jonkonnu in Jamaica , Wynter follows her own advice andattempts to link with the invisible heart of the nation. She proposes atheory of cultural adaptation that she terms indigenization rather thancreolization. Indigenization is defined as the cultural process of

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adaptation, partial retention, re-invention, and transformation, thatenabled enslaved Africans to become natives in the New World.Creolization, on the other hand, is defined as a mode of assimilation, aform of incomplete indigenization that is marked by the tacit acceptanceof European norms. Jamaican culture, as represented in the Jonkonnuand its related complex of folk dances is thus a primarily Africaninvention. Wynter sees the various syncretisms of Jonkonnu and theAfro-Jamaican religion, Myal, as evidence of a common Jamaicanculture forged from different African cultural inputs. Myal ischaracterized as Jamaica's first genuine folk religion, and the preEmancipation equivalent of Haitian voodoo.

Wynter reads these folk forms as cultural registers, performativemodalities of a history of transformation in which they aresimultaneously agents and products of indigenization. Her approachsignals a shift from literary criticism to a mode of cultural criticism thatposits a meta-theory of Caribbean history and culture. For Wynter,Caribbean history is largely the cultural history of the process ofindigenization, and she suggests the susceptibility of history to culturaldetermination. Given the cultural imperatives that drove the colonialenterprise, Wynter argues that anti-colonial resistance also requiredindigenous cultural modes. She maps the relationship betweenCaribbean history and culture on to the asymmetrical relations of powerand hierarchy that shape Caribbean societies. As she eloquently argues,even history has been partly trapped in the conflict between the officialculture of the Caribbean, and the unofficial and excluded culture (35).Hence the exclusion of the popular cultural forms from the mainstreamhistories which are largely concerned with the Europeansuperstructure of civilization . Folk and popular cultures are confinedby mainstream historical discourse to the interstices of history .This notion of a marginalized cultural process with an alternativeepistemology and worldview recurs in Wynter's later work as a fullblown theory of liminality. The latter is an important concept because,as Paget Henry observes, it represents those categories that arediametrically opposed to the foundational categories of the West's




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ideological discourse. Thus Jonkonnu, outside of the official discourseof the plantation, articulates an interstitial history that is performedrather than written and derived from the plot rather than the plantation -although subordinated by the latter, a situation which results in theinescapable paradox and contradiction of the slave being part-slave inrelation to the European plantation, and part peasant in relation to theplot of land on which he fed himself and his family (35). It was thisparadox, this liminal condition, that fueled the process ofindigenization.

Wynter sees the fundamental ambivalence of the slave's involvementin two contradictory processes as essentially the history of folk culturein Jamaica. She formulates an unequivocal proposition that the historyof indigenization is the history of a categorical ambivalence which theslaves sought to resolve via resistant cultural practices embodied in theirfolklore. Wynter's emphasis on creativity and resistance as definitivefeatures of indigenization undoubtedly accounts for her dismissivedefinition of creolization as a mode of assimilation. But, as KamauBrathwaite notes, creolization encompasses both assimilation andresistant indigenization. Brathwaite argues that Wynter createsunnecessary distinctions in order to serve her analytical constructwhereas the problem and reality of Caribbean culturation lies in itsambivalent acceptance-rejection syndrome; its psycho-cultural plurality... The whole Jonkonnu/Carnival folk expression of the Caribbean isbased on this creative ambivalence. 10

For Brathwaite, creolization is a two-pronged totality, whereasWynter defines it in terms of a reductive singularity. Her anticreolization bias stems from her emphasis on the power of cognitivecategories to determine historical and cultural processes, hence anyaccommodation with the plantation superstructure is viewed aswholesale surrender to the colonial world view, rather than as pragmaticsurvival strategies.11 This somewhat reductive view is compensated forby the clarity of her analysis of the historical accounts of Jonkonnu inJamaica. Her painstaking reconstruction of the historical and culturalfactors that influenced Jonkonnu's evolution from the seventeenth

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century to the last quarter of the twentieth century reveals Wynter sability to undertake an ethnological study along the lines of Jean PriceMars' seminal study of Haitian folk culture. Wynter's ethnologicalwork is based primarily on archival retrieval and speculative elaborationof the lineaments of a historical process from the documentary records,left by Europeans who were often biased against their subject andoblivious to its cultural meanings. In order to retrieve these meanings,Wynter uses a comparative schema to weigh accounts of JamicanJonkonnu against descriptions of similar cultural complexes in theAmericas and Africa. Given the unreliability of the primary texts,Wynter resorts to a methodology that analyses transformations in theJonkonnu masks and dance movements as indices of indigenization.The mask becomes, as Brathwaite astutely observes, animage/ikon/event through which she could symbolize the folk .12

Indeed, Brathwaite's interpretation is borne out by Wynter's ownreading of the mask as a complex totality of costume, the dancer, dance,and music. The mask mediates worlds - the supernatural and thehuman, the living and the dead - and it is a complex cultural code: itspeaks a complex and symbolic language which can only be interpretedby the initiates (38). Dancer and dance articulate this language in themovements of the dance. Wynter charts the transformations in thegrammar of this symbolic language through intertwined etymologies ofrituals, festivals, masks, and responses, to show the transmutation ofAfrican ancestral spirits into the devils of Afro-Christian Jamaica, andthe acquiring of European elements such as sword fights, doctor plays,and recitation of extracts from Shakespeare (39). By periodizing herdiscussion, Wynter shows that by the nineteenth century, large scalecreolization of Jonkonnu had occurred as a result of Creole slavesdominating the festival. Despite this creolization, Wynter argues thatJonkonnu still retained some of its links to an African religiousworldview that played a central role in slave resistance. Jonkonnu isthus the public, more secular face of a syncretic cult religion (whichconstituted the matrix of Jamaican folk culture), and it is one expressionof a generative cultural grammar.




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Wynter s use of the mask as complex cultural trope is an innovativegesture that suggests certain analytical possibilities for nativist culturalcriticism. Brathwaite grasps the methodological and conceptualsignificance of Wynter's trope in his description of its deployment: TheAfrican mask in Jamaica is slowly transformed in form and meaningunder the pressure of slavery and becomes a paradigm ofadaptation/survival, through which means the slave comes intoauthentic possession of the landscape and so can be taken as the truereflector of local values and (art)-forms. 13 Wynter's use of the maskenables connections to be made between the public performance ofJonkonnu and the repressed Myal religion which had been drivenunderground. As she succinctly notes, Jonkonnu is linked to Myalismthrough meaning, song, and dance (40). Her formulating of this linkageis enabled by her interdisciplinary mix of ethnological and historicalapproaches, the disciplinary convergence which results in a mode ofcultural archaeology that merits Brathwaite's praise of the essay as amasterwork. Wynter sifts through details to reveal connections; sheposits instances and events within larger cultural configurations as shesearches for the grammar and syntax that govern cultural expressions.Her predilection is toward finding the deep structures of meaning thatdetermine cultural manifestations and outcomes. In her tabulation ofthe folk complex of Jamaican Jonkonnu, she outlines a morphology oftransformation that recalls the work of Vladimir Propp, but mercifullybereft of the latter's sterile terminology and measuring stick approach.14

Wynter's morphology is anchored in the ambitious proposition thatMyal evolved out of the need of enslaved Africans to present a unifiedfront via a general Jamaican cult religion as opposed to tribal ones(41). She cites historical accounts to show that Myal developed out of aseries of syncretisms of tribal cults and rituals in order to engender largescale cultural and political solidarity. The proscription of Myal resultedfrom the plantocracy's fear of the insurgent potential of such solidarity,but Jonkonnu was tolerated, especially its creolized versions which wereseen as innocuous fun. Wynter points out however that the Africanworld views do not polarize the sacred and the secular, hence Myalism

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and Jonkonnu contained elements of each other (41). Both Myalismand Jonkonnu transmitted elements to a continuum of surviving folkdances and religion, and this continuum secretes the history of culturalsyncretism and indigenization in Jamaica.15

Indigenization, in Wynter's account, is primarily a secularizingprocess that enabled Jonkonnu to emerge out of the culturalcontestations of plantation society. Creolization resulted in theprogressive marginalization of African cultural elements, butEmancipation and the transformation of African slaves into an AfroJamaican peasantry rescued Jonkonnu from wholesale creolization.Jonkonnu, in its creolized form, mirrored the social relations and powerstructure of plantation society, but it also provided a mockingcarnivalesque critique in its satirical portrayals of the society. Wynter,however, while acknowledging Jonkonnu's liminality, argues thatCreole browns and blacks were more assimilationist than they wereculturally hybrid, since they represented - and represent still - ratherthe attempt to shed one culture and achieve another. Wynter'sdamning indictment of assimilation is part and parcel of her rejection ofcreolization as the paradigm for nativist intellectual work. Creolization,in her reading, is imitation, not real acculturation, since it was not aculture that was responded to, but its techniques - its status power (43).In contrast to the conventional wisdom on creolization which oftenconflates racial and cultural hybridity, Wynter argues that it wasprimarily racially unmixed Revivalists who produced the truesyncretism of the Jamaican cultural tradition, the culturally mixed,accepting all influences within the basically Afro-Jamaican matrix.Wynter's notion of indigenization reveals a scepticism towards thenotion of creolization: essentially, she assumes that Creole discourse isstill caught within the institutional and semantic categories of the West.Unlike indigenization, which Simon During defines as a mode ofradical alterity, creolization, for Wynter, results in phenotypical andexpressive hybridity, but it does not alter the cognitive andepistemological hierarchy of colonial society. Indigenization, however,secretes other cosmologies, different cognitive perspectives and




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representations of the human that can challenge the global norms.Jonkonnu provides intimations of Wynter's later explanatorytemplate - the epistemic rupture coeval with the discovery of the New

World, a rupture that enabled the birth of the West, and the foundingcategories of humanism. Wynter's alertness to the use of culture as aweapon of colonization, particularly the cultural ascriptions accorded towriting, is evident in her analysis of the process of repetition whichrepresented humanity as synonymous with Europeans, and Europeanculture (35). This notion evolves into the anti-humanist tenor ofpoststructuralist essays such as The Ceremony Must Be Found: AfterHumanism (1984), but it also underpins the three essays that followJonkonnu . It is in these essays that Wynter returns to the project ofliterary criticism that she announced in Reflections , but the literarycritical insights are buttressed by the cultural and historical propositionsdeployed in Jonkonnu . Whereas Reflections provides a model fordismantling aesthetic and formalist positions in literature and criticism,Jonkonnu supplements these with a model of. interdisciplinarycultural studies, a repertoire of cultural and historical formulations thatprovide heuristic frames for interpreting literary and critical texts.Novel and History , Creole Criticism', and One Love also mixcaustic polemic and theoretical propositions in often uneven but always

provocative arguments that evoke the ideological and intellectualoppositions, and the often personal rancour that infused Caribbeancultural debates of the early 1970s. With hindsight, one recognizes thatthe acerbic and overly polemical style of these essays is a function of theexigencies of battle, the perception that fundamental cultural andepistemological issues regarding Caribbean identity are at stake.Wynter resorts readily to a rhetoric of struggle and crisis which iscongruent with her definition of criticism, and this rhetoric relies onstark oppositions, polarities, dichotomies, agonistic and manicheanfigures that heighten the confrontational tone.These oppositions are evident in Novel and History, Plot andPlantation - the published text of Wynter's presentation at thememorable ACLALS conference, which was held at the Mona campus

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of the University of the West Indies in 1971. This conference, like thecritical responses to The Islands in Between, and the publication of Savacou3/4, became one of the flashpoints of the aesthetic debates of the period.Caribbean concerns dominated the conference, effectively relegatingother regional literatures to the margins. Kamau Brathwaite recalls theevent as a moment of confrontation between the cultural gorillas/guerrillas and the establishment, and Laurence Breiner offers ariveting account of the literary and cultural politics involved in this battleover defining a Caribbean aesthetic.16 Wynter, whose theoreticalpositions aligned her with the cultural guerrillas , weighed in with thispaper which conceptualized several large questions and propositions,namely the relationship between history and the novel, the politics ofhistorical representation, the status of the novel in the history ofmodernity, and the simultaneous emergence of the novel form and NewWorld plantation societies. She reads Vic Reid's New Day and H.G.DeLisser's Revenge in light of these larger questions as two novels whichreflect the contending perspectives of folk and elite world viewsrespectively.

Wynter begins by defining her operative terms within the context ofthe colonial experience in the Caribbean, an experience shaped by theubiquitous presence of the plantation. She extrapolates GeorgeBeckford's definition of the Caribbean as the classic plantation area intoa foundational proposition. Caribbean societies, she argues, were bothcause and effect of the emergence of the market economy. Thefounding moment of modernity is described in terms of its sorcerouseffects as a change of such world historical magnitude, that we are all,without exception still 'enchanted', imprisoned, deformed andschizophrenic in its bewitched reality (95).This bewitched state of affairs is coeval with the rise of the novel,hence the novel and Caribbean plantation societies emerge via the sameprocess. Wynter derives this argument from Lucien Goldmann'sstructuralist Marxist theorizing of the relationship between literarygenres and socio-economic transformations. It is this relationship thatenables her declaration that history in the Caribbean is fiction: a fiction




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written, dominated, controlled by forces external to itself' (95). Onlycollective resistance of the colonized produces facts, and Vic Reid's NewDay represents two such moments of resistance that write new facts intobeing.

Wynter implies that fiction is more valid as a mode of articulatinghistory than the discipline of history itself.17 Hence her concern withexploring the importance of historical representation in Reid's novel,particularly in light of Garth's question concerning the negativerepresentation of Bogle and Gordon. Wynter sees the evasive andambivalent answer of Pa John Campbell as the fictive parallel to thegradualist ideology of the Jamaican middle class nationalism ofNorman Manley's PNP. Garth's question points to the Manicheanrepresentational schema of colonial history : Yet, from the way Garthasks the question we see that the history taught in the schools is a historybased around a Manichean myth. Bogle and Gordon are devils. Eyre isa saint. This was the version of history taught by the forces that upheldthe plantation (96).

Wynter uses Lukac's notion of typicality to designate Bogle,Gordon, and Eyre as world historical characters representing historical,cultural, and ideological forces - the clash between plantation and plot.The plantation is dominated by the external forces of empire driven bymarket and exchange value imperatives; the plot represents indigenous,autochthonous, world views oriented toward use value. In this light, shedraws on Lucien Goldmann's theory of the relationship betweenliterary genres and economic structures to highlight the contradictorysituation of novelists who, by the fact of their craft and genre, aresimultaneously oriented toward both use and exchange values. Hencethe paradoxical effect of the novel, a product of the market economy,developing as a form of resistance to market society . The novelfacilitates a critique of the very historical process which has brought itto such heights of fulfilment (97).For Wynter, this critique is exemplified in Reid's New Day which, inits portrayal of the terror unleashed by British colonialism against thepeasant insurgents, shows the logic of colonial power: its ability to

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corrupt even liberal temperaments, and its readiness to crush any threatto its existence. Wynter reads DeLisser's Revenge as a fiction of theplantation, a fiction challenged by Reid's counterfactual history of theplot. This discursive confrontation she argues becomes a metaphor forboth the history of Caribbean society and also the cultural debates ragingat the ACLALS conference: I suggest that the conflict and clash thathas taken place between two defined groups in this conference, betweenthose who defend 'the autonomy' of the 'civilized' highly educatedartist; and those who defend the claims of the community and the folk,has little to do with racial division and everything to do with those who,like Joyce, defend the values of the plantation and those who like Bogle,represent the values of the plot (99).

Wynter avers, here, as in Jonkonnu , Reflections , CreoleCriticism , and One Love , that the silent majority of Caribbeansubjects are ambivalent, like Pa John Campbell, the narrator-hero ofNew Day. She recognizes the complexity of such ambivalence as a forcefor creativity as well as alienation. Ambivalence, she argues is theprimary characteristic of the Caribbean response to the conflictingvalues of plantation and plot: For if the history of Caribbean society isthat of a dual relation between plantation and plot, the two poles whichoriginate in a single historical process, the ambivalence between the twohas been and is the distinguishing characteristic of the Caribbeanresponse. This ambivalence is at once the root cause of our alienation;and the possibility of our salvation (99).This notion of ambivalence is contextualized in terms of a sequenceof historical factors beginning with the simultaneous emergence of thehumanist heresy and the discovery of the New World, followed byimperial expansion, and the redefinition of culture in terms of thesubordination of nature. The latter concept of culture helped tolegitimise the worldview of the plantation, but the plot system underslavery allowed the slaves both a subsistence space and conceptualground which facilitated the retention and adaptation of Africancultural legacies. Novel and History thus reiterates Jonkonnu'spropositions within the conceptual language of structuralist Marxism.




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The plot represents a system driven by use values, and it resists thehegemonic order of the plantation. Given the exigencies of theplantation order, however, the slave ended up being ambivalentbetween both systems.

Wynter s reading of the categorical ambivalence of the folk enablesher cultural nationalism to abjure the romantic myths of blood and soilessentialism. Instead, she posits folk culture as a point outside of thehegemonic order of the plantation, a conceptual site which can providecritical insights to disenchant the impossible reality in which we areenmeshed ( Novel and History , 100). This is the assumption of astrategic liminality, rather than an atavistic return to origins: But thereis no question of going back to a society, a folk pattern whose structurehas already been undermined by the pervasive market economy (100).The folk culture exists, not in terms of unaltered legacies, but rather inthe resistant, secretive history expressed in folk songs, kuminaceremonies, folk memory , a resistant history that counters the negativerepresentation of Bogle and Gordon in the plantation's myths ofhistory . Both plantation and plot constitute different ways of readinghistory, and Wynter appropriates the dichotomy as a salient symbol ofthe different claims, perspectives, and interests that constitute the faultlines of extant Caribbean literary and cultural debates.

Wynter's unequivocal division of criticism into camps is explicitlyspelt out in her attack on Kenneth Ramchand in Creole Criticism: ACritique. This essay is probably the most polemical ofWynter's works,and its no holds barred attack on Ramchand's critical positions stillevinces, three decades later, a tone of personal acrimony, partly due tothe fact that Ramchand had taken Wynter to task for devaluing thefunction of criticism. Ramchand's article, Concern for Criticism takesissue with what he terms a tradition of enthusiastic content summaryand naive/pretentious socio-political and racial-cultural generalisationthatpasses for literary criticism in the West Indies. 18 Wynter is lumpedtogether with Gerald Moore, Janheinz Jahn, and Edward KamauBrathwaite, as an exponent of this brand of pseudo-criticism, a neoAftican theory that reduces criticism to socio-political commentary. In

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contrast, Ramchand advocates a practice of literary criticism that ismodeled on F.R. Leavis's focus on the text, on the organisation ofwords on the page. 19

Wynter subjects Ramchand's critical positions in Concern forCriticism and The West Indian Novel and Its Background to a searingcritical scrutiny that dismisses his Leavisite approach as sheer colonialmimicry. Ramchand is accused of ideological duplicity andlegerdemain, and of harnessing Fanon to promote interests antitheticalto Fanon's own project. Given Wynter's own investment in thecentrality of Fanon's ideas to her own work, her critique of Ramchandseeks to uncover him as a poseur who adopts a stance of disinterestedobjectivity in order to surreptitiously denigrate the African culturalpresence in the Caribbean. Wynter points to the antagonisms of raceand culture that underlie the apparently consensual concerns of creolecriticism . Ramchand's formalist criteria and concern for criticalstandards simply mask his antipathy to the centrality of Africa inCaribbean societies. In short, Wynter avers that Ramchand's criticalsensibility exemplifies the ambivalence of the creolist cultural criticwho is blinkered by the uncritical acceptance of metropolitan norms. Asthe exemplar of creole criticism, Ramchand is scathingly dismissed asan illusionist, a sorcerer's apprentice who is himself enthralled by thespell of Europe. Creole criticism is the cultural expression of the politicsof creolism , liberal humanism translated into a neo-colonialstructure , a politics of rhetoric which substitutes the appearance ofchange for the actual reality of transformative action. Such rhetoricalpolitics excises conflict in order to produce a verbal consensus thatforecloses alternative readings ( Creole Criticism , 14).

Wynter reads Ramchand's opus, The West Indian Novel and ItsBackground, in light of the above. Contrary to his claims of racetranscendent objectivity, Wynter asserts that his criticism is informed bya principle of ressentiment that is rooted in Indo-Caribbean identitypolitics and claims of belonging, claims that have been often overlookedin the context of Afro-Caribbean claims on national identity.Ramchand, therefore, merely parlays the socio-cultural drama of




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unacknowledged Indo-Canbbean subjectivity into a critical stance thatasserts his own status as a native . Hence the fallacy of his Leavisiteprescriptions, since his criticism is as contaminated by sociological,historical, and ideological determinants as the proponents of the neoAftican school. For Wynter, Ramchand's refusal to acknowledge hisown ideological and political cards typifies the duplicity of Creolecriticism, a duplicity which she attacks from the outset as a symptom ofthe intellectual malaise of creolist discourse. Behind Ramchand'sproclamations, Wynter sees only the same enchanted myth of Europe,the same categories of thought that represent the African as the negationof the human, the negation of culture and reason. The blindness ofCreole criticism to the African connection in Caribbean literature resultsfrom what Wynter describes as a grid of misconceptions prepackagedin the cornflakes of a colonial education (12).

Wynter's acerbic critique of Ramchand essentially accuses him ofdeploying the conceptual categories of criticism to efface the Africanpresence, and her sustained reading of his book serves the polemicalpurpose of showing up the derivative state of Caribbean literarycriticism. But her primary argument is that the denial of the Africanpresence reinforces the myths of African cultural barrenness, henceleaving unchallenged the image of the European as standard bearer ofReason and Culture. Her technique of highlighting both the details ofindividual texts and the cultural, philosophical, and global implicationsof textual particulars, constitutes her own variation on the dialecticalmethod, a method which enables her recurring concepts to accumulatesemantic and semiotic densities with each new deployment. By the endof Creole Criticism , Wynter's dialectical interplay of system andprocess has led her to another theoretical heresy, namely that thecontemporary popular cultures of the Caribbean contain the seeds ofalternative epistemologies that can breach the conceptual grid imposedby the false universalism of Western humanism. She argues that thesocio-economic and demographic transformation of the Caribbeanfrom primarily agrarian and peasant societies to urbanised, capitalistoriented ones merely transmutes the Afro-Christian cult religions...

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into new forms... Folksongs are transformed into urban jazz, calypso,ska, reggae (33). Caribbean popular culture thus inherits thealternative cosmologies of Jonkonnu, Myal, and other related forms.Wynter posits the popular, vernacular forms as the conceptualparadigms for countering the conceptual sorcery of humanism and theexchange values of capitalism with the use values of the plot, a web ofinherited and reinvented beliefs (34). Continuity and change are thusaccounted for in Wynter's reading of folk culture and culturaltransformation, and she transposes these processes onto the literarysituation by arguing that the novelists also write out of the sameexistential circumstances of exile and psychic trespass that give rise toska, calypso, and reggae (33).

Wynter's acerbic critique of the limitations of Creole criticism isreiterated in One Love , her final essay of this period. She pillorieswhat she perceives to be inauthentic attempts by Black writers tochallenge the negative representations of Afro-Caribbean subjects.Although she regards Negritude as a genuine challenge to the Word ofMan, she castigates the discourse of Black Power and its literaryoffspring as mere inversions of the Eurocentric conceptual models ofnegation. Literary Blackism , as she terms it, is to be shunned since it isstill imprisoned within the cognitive and conceptual structures thatproduce racial hierarchy and domination. Like Fanon, she diagnosesBlack Power and the modish cant of Afrocentric literary populism asafflicted by the same racial pathologies as their white counterparts.Wynter reads the rhetorical representation of race in the essays andpoems in the 1971 anthology, One Love, as symptomatic of an emergentBlack middle-class nationalist discourse that she terms AfroJamaicanism , a discourse whose conceptual sins mirror the flaws ofcreolist discourse.

In fact, Wynter sees Afro-Jamaicanism as marked by the categoricalambivalence of Creole criticism and cultural politics. Her readingfocuses on Andrew Salkey's introduction and the contributions ofAudvil King, and she situates the anthology within the context of theburgeoning Black Power movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.




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Wynter acknowledges the need for anthologies like One Love, given theaftermath of the Rodney riots in Jamaica, the Black Power revolt inTrinidad, and Michael Manley's People's National Party sweeping theJamaican 1972 general elections on a populist campaign of Power tothe People . Hence the importance of providing an outlet for the newwave of consciously experienced black feeling which originated in theUnited States and touched responsive chords in the Black population ofthe Caribbean ( One Love, 64). True to form, however, Wynter'sacknowledgment is marked by a profound concern with understandingthe historical and cultural relations and processes that underlie theexperience and expression of race and racial solidarity in the Caribbean.In a sweeping overview of the Jamaican historical and social scene,Wynter uses race as a template for understanding social and economiccategories. In this light, the emergence of Black consciousness takes onboth racial and class dimensions, given the nature of Jamaica's socioeconomic structure. Wynter discusses the attempts by differentgenerations of nationalist writers to explore these social realities, butwhile she approves of the efforts of the first wave of writers such as VicReid and Roger Mais, she is scathing in her critique of the second andthird wave of writers and intellectuals such as Andrew Salkey and RexNettleford respectively. The latter are described as oriented towardappropriating folk culture within the mode of fraudulent representationthat she terms literary blackism , an exoticising of folk culture typifiedin Nettleford's choreography and cultural criticism (70). Salkey's fictionis excoriated for its undeveloped understanding of folk culture, and thefailure to relate individual pathologies to the structure ofunderdevelopment. Wynter insists on the need to locate particulareffects within the structural matrices of colonialism, monopolycapitalism, persistent poverty, and underdevelopment. While thetendentious and contentious tone of her polemic introduces anunnecessary acrimony into her arguments, her fundamentalpropositions centre on substantive issues that affect the protocols ofcultural expression and commentary in the Caribbean.

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One Love , like Jonkonnu , explicates the politics of Africandiasporic cultures in terms of a subversive syncretism that produces anintrahistory , a liminal cultural space, replete with all the creative

possibilities of the borderland. Wynter uses Amiri Baraka's notion ofthe frontier zone to posit the liminality of folk culture as a site ofconceptual and intellectual renewal for the Caribbean intelligentsia.Whereas, in Reflections , Wynter states the necessity of such renewalas a polemical call to arms, One Love presents this proposition as ahistorical fact. For Wynter, the assertions of black identity and nativeculture are inseparable from the social upheavals that enabledCaribbean intellectuals to connect with the frontier zone of folkculture (66). Anti-colonial political nationalism is thus inseparable fromanti-colonial cultural nationalism. It is this Fanonian position whichunderlies Wynter's reading of the anthology as a representative text ofthe emergent discourse around race and national identity inpostcolonial Jamaica. As such, the conceptual and artisticshortcomings of the anthology derive from both the failure ofimagination and the failure of adequate apprehension of social realitiesthat characterize the middle-class contributors to One Love.

In One Love , Wynter's early concerns are crystallized in a wideranging discussion of race and its representation. She focuses on therelationship between socio-economic deprivation and culturalmarginality, and argues that a radical rethinking of race necessitates acritique of global capitalism, since the racial classification of Africans asthe zero-sum of humanity is predicated on material and economicpractices. The revaluing of black humanity is inextricably tied to thedestruction of capitalism, hence the shortcoming of blackism whichmakes no connection between the black struggle and the globaleconomic context. Wynter's unremitting emphasis on the relationbetween structures of power and cultural articulations constitutes thethematic and conceptual principle that One Love reiterates with starkclarity. Wynter's critique of the pieces in the anthology is ultimately notcentred on their literary merits but rather on the effectiveness of theirrhetorical articulations of a liberated black and human experience of




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Being (93). Her affinity with Fanon resonates throughout thisstatement, and it summarizes the gist of Wynter's early intellectualproject of articulating a heretical critique of humanism that revalues theblack subject by using the marginalized cultures of the diaspora assubversive conceptual and epistemological points of departure.Wynter's later post-structuralist turn merely incorporates andtransforms these insights into more systematic inquisitorial tools thatfacilitate her original and challenging critique of Western reason,epistemology, and authority.

NotesKamau Brathwaite, The Love Axe/1: Developing a Caribbean Aesthetic1962-74, Part Two, Ban 16.62 (December 1967):101.Paget Henry, Caliban's Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy. NewYork: Routledge, 2000, 118.Sylvia Wynter, Lady Nugent's Journal,'' Jamaica Journal 1.1 (December1967):34.Sylvia Wynter, We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk about aLittle Culture: Reflections on West Indian Writing and Criticism,Jamaica Journal 2 (December 1968):23-32; 3 (March 1969):27-42', citedhereafter as Reflections ; Jonkonnu in Jamaica: Towards the

Interpretation of Folk Dance as a Cultural Process, Jamaica Journal 4(1970):34-38, cited hereafter as Jonkonnu ; Novel and History, Plotand Plantation, Savacou 5 (1971):95-102, cited hereafter as Novel andHistory ; Creole Criticism: A Critique, New World Quarterly 5.4(1973): 12-36; One Love: Rhetoric or Reality? - Aspects of AfroJamaicanism, Caribbean Studies 12 (1972):64-99, cited hereafter as OneLove.George Lamming, The Pleasures ofExile (London: Michael Joseph, 1960);Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967, rpt. 1981).6 Wynter, Reflections , 31.7 Ibid, 6.See Adorno's opening essay in Prisms, Cultural Criticism and Society , inwhich he argues that transcendent criticism assumes a pseudoobjectivity, an Archimedean position above culture and the blindness

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of society (31). Immanent criticism, on the other hand, is a dialecticalprocedure which recognizes that culture and criticism are embeddedwithin society, hence it seeks to lay bare the workings of ideologicalconventions (32-33).9 Paget Henry, Caliban's Reason, 124.10 Kamau Brathwaite, ContradictoryOmens, Kingston: Savacou, 1974. 16.11 Richard Burton's recent study of Caribbean creolization, Afro-Creole:Power, Opposition,and Play, in theCaribbean (Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1997),also reads creolization in terms of assimilation, although Burtonconcedes that resistance is an element of creolization.12 Brathwaite, The Love Axe/1 , 102.13 Ibid., 103.14' See Vladimir Propp, The Morphologyofthe Folk Tale.I5' Wynter's assertion of a cultural continuum resonates with extant ideas ofthe linguistic Creole continuum as well as Brathwaite's model, inContradictory Omens, of a variegated creolization.16 See Brathwaite's The Love Axe/1 and Barabajan Poems (Savacou, 1994)for his insider's recollections of the event; and Laurence Breiner's AnIntroductionto WestIndian Poetry Cambridge, 1998). Gordon Rohlehr'sseminal paper, Literature and the Folk , was delivered at thisconference which also saw a keynote address by Brathwaite as well asV.S. Naipaul's dismissal of the whole matter as parochial frenzy that didnot merit a response.17 Wynter's position regarding the imaginative recuperation of history issimilar to those held by Derek Walcott, Wilson Harris, and EdouardGlissant. As Paget Henry argues, her philosophy of history bridges thehistoricist positions of Lamming and James and the poeticist stance ofWalcott and Harris.18 Kenneth Ramchand, Concern forCriticism, The LiteraryHalf-Yearly 1.2'(1970): 155-.19 Ramchand, Concern forCriticism, 157.


norval edwards, "'talking about a little culture': sylvia wynter's early essays"

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