Strolling in the Ruins: The Caribbean's Non-sovereign Modern in the Early Twentieth Century

by Faith Smith

Overview

Faith Smith examines everyday voices in Jamaica and Trinidad during the “quiet period” between the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion and World War I in the British Caribbean’s history to discern sentiments about empire and nationhood.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478017042
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	03/17/2023
Pages:	280
Sales rank:	735,381
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.69(d)

About the Author

Faith Smith is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies and of English at Brandeis University. She is the author of Creole Recitations: John Jacob Thomas and Colonial Formation in the Late Nineteenth-Century Caribbean and editor of Sex and the Citizen: Interrogating the Caribbean.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction. Introducing a Quiet Period  1
1. Cuba, South Africa, and the Anglophone Caribbean’s New Imperial Century  33
2. Ruination’s Intimate Architecture  68
3. Photography’s “Typical Negro”  118
4. Plotting Inheritance  144
Coda  186
Notes  191
Bibliography  229
Index  257

What People are Saying About This

David Scott

“Faith Smith’s Strolling in the Ruins seeks to perturb and discompose the pervasive story of Anglophone Caribbean sovereignty, with its familiar rhythms and moments, events and directions, and texts and figures. With an insouciant edge, muted irony, and compelling insight, she invites us to reevaluate some of our most cherished conceits of gendered, sexual, racial, and political citizenship. Above all, Smith is a consummate critic of the will to power of the heroic Caribbean narrative of postcolonial achievement.”

Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair - Deborah A. Thomas

“A complex and critically important exploration of Caribbean identity between emancipation and independence, Strolling in the Ruins builds on and transcends contemporary discourse on the centrality of nationalist sovereignty to political life. By taking seriously ordinary people’s commitment to empire and their understanding of their gendered and racialized place within it, Faith Smith brilliantly and innovatively brings the central questions of our political modern into sharp view.”