Creole Recitations: John Jacob Thomas and Colonial Formation in the Late Nineteenth-Century Caribbean / Edition 1

Add to Wishlist

ISBN-10:: 0813921430
ISBN-13:: 9780813921433
Pub. Date:: 12/29/2002
Publisher:: University of Virginia Press

ISBN-10:: 0813921430
ISBN-13:: 9780813921433
Pub. Date:: 12/29/2002
Publisher:: University of Virginia Press

Creole Recitations: John Jacob Thomas and Colonial Formation in the Late Nineteenth-Century Caribbean / Edition 1

Paperback

$27.5

$27.50

SHIP THIS ITEM
In stock. Ships in 1-2 days.
PICK UP IN STORE

Your local store may have stock of this item.

Available within 2 business hours

SHIP THIS ITEM

Temporarily Out of Stock Online

Please check back later for updated availability.

Overview

John Jacob Thomas (1841-1889) was one of the leading members of a newly emergent intelligentsia in nineteenth-century Trinidad—a group that could be identified as both "Victorian" and "Pan-Africanist"—who not only challenged British imperialist accounts of Trinidad but also tried to show the interconnections, bloodlines, and origins of "Caribbean" and "English" identities usually perceived as separate and distinct. As a member of that emerging black lower middle class, Thomas was well known for his 1869 study of Trinidad’s Creole language, as well as for Froudacity (1889), his pointed and witty response to the travel narrative of the Victorian James Anthony Froude, an early example of "writing back to empire."

Responding to Trinidad’s transformation by significant migrations from the eastern Caribbean, West Africa, and the Indian subcontinent, he sought to "tame" the working-class energies that radicalized his work and to bring them in line with "modern" conceptions of the nation. As a defender of francophone cultural production in a British colony, though a loyal subject of Queen Victoria, and as a pan-Africanist whose commitments were simultaneously diasporic and local, Thomas complicates current discussions of colonial and postcolonial intellectuals, Black Atlantic paradigms, and Victorian intellectual life.

In Creole Recitations, the first full-length study of Thomas, Faith Smith puts his texts in dialogue with other narratives by local and international Pan-Africanists, Victorian intellectuals, and local and regional blacks, coloreds, and whites. Shedding light on the intellectual terrain of the late nineteenth century, she provides an important context for better-known figures of twentieth-century Caribbean literature such as C. L. R. James, V. S. Naipaul, and Jamaica Kincaid.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813921433
Publisher:	University of Virginia Press
Publication date:	12/29/2002
Series:	New World Studies
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.25(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Faith Smith is Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies and English and American Literature at Brandeis University.

	Preface	ix
	Acknowledgments	xxv
	Introduction: Keywords	1
1	"Writing Was Easy to Him": Education, Labor, Distinction	23
2	"Her Majesty's Ethiopic Subjects": London, Englishness, Pan-Africanism	67
3	Can Anything Good Come out of Cedros?: Creole Grammar, Theory and Practice	95
4	West Indian Fables Explained: Travel and Translation in the 1880s	128
	Afterword	173
	Notes	177
	Works Cited	189
	Index	205

What People are Saying About This

"The kind of intellectual biography/history that Smith provides -- with scrupulous attention paid to earlier colonial history in addition to postcolonial politics -- is rare in the canonical fields, let alone in the more recent domain of black studies. This work will create strong ripples in Caribbean studies, some of them usefully controversial. It will certainly change the face of the Caribbean intellectual tradition and introduce Professor Smith as a leading name in the field." -- Supriya NairTulane University, author of Caliban's Curse: George Lamming and the Revisioning of History

Supriya Nair

The kind of intellectual biography/history that Smith provides—with scrupulous attention paid to earlier colonial history in addition to postcolonial politics—is rare in the canonical fields, let alone in the more recent domain of black studies. This work will create strong ripples in Caribbean studies, some of them usefully controversial. It will certainly change the face of the Caribbean intellectual tradition and introduce Professor Smith as a leading name in the field.

Supriya NairTulane University

From the B&N Reads Blog

Page 1 of

Editorial Reviews

The kind of intellectual biography/history that Smith provides—with scrupulous attention paid to earlier colonial history in addition to postcolonial politics—is rare in the canonical fields, let alone in the more recent domain of black studies. This work will create strong ripples in Caribbean studies, some of them usefully controversial. It will certainly change the face of the Caribbean intellectual tradition and introduce Professor Smith as a leading name in the field.
—Supriya Nair, Tulane University, author of Caliban’s Curse: George Lamming and the Revisioning of History

From the Publisher

The kind of intellectual biography/history that Smith provides—with scrupulous attention paid to earlier colonial history in addition to postcolonial politics—is rare in the canonical fields, let alone in the more recent domain of black studies. This work will create strong ripples in Caribbean studies, some of them usefully controversial. It will certainly change the face of the Caribbean intellectual tradition and introduce Professor Smith as a leading name in the field.

Supriya NairTulane University

The kind of intellectual biography/history that Smith provides—with scrupulous attention paid to earlier colonial history in addition to postcolonial politics—is rare in the canonical fields, let alone in the more recent domain of black studies. This work will create strong ripples in Caribbean studies, some of them usefully controversial. It will certainly change the face of the Caribbean intellectual tradition and introduce Professor Smith as a leading name in the field.

Supriya Nair

Creole Recitations: John Jacob Thomas and Colonial Formation in the Late Nineteenth-Century Caribbean / Edition 1

Creole Recitations: John Jacob Thomas and Colonial Formation in the Late Nineteenth-Century Caribbean / Edition 1

Paperback

Temporarily Out of Stock Online

Overview

Product Details

About the Author

Table of Contents

What People are Saying About This

Customer Reviews

Temporarily Out of Stock Online

Overview

Product Details

About the Author

Table of Contents

What People are Saying About This

Related Subjects

Customer Reviews