Caroline Rody
Abstract Chapter 10, “The Great Plantation House in Anglophone Caribbean Literature,” explores the layered historical archive and key chronotope of an island world of brutal enslavement. It begins with three texts—by St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott, Jamaican American novelist Michelle Cliff, and Jamaican poet Kei Miller—about contemporary visits to Caribbean plantation house ruins or museums, attempts to conjure the violent slave plantation universe underlying the falsifying state of quiet beauty that belies unfinished decolonization. The chapter then considers four historical fictions—by Jean Rhys, Alejo Carpentier, Marlon James, and Lawrence Scott—that dramatize the horrors of Caribbean slavery leading to fiery revolts, as well as to palimpsestic great house repurposings. Rhys layers beneath a famous English literary house burning an originary event: the torching by the formerly enslaved of a Caribbean plantation. Carpentier’s hero observes cycles of tyrannical Haitian rule and revolt through the destruction and rebuilding of mansions. When he cobbles together his post-slavery home in the plantation house ruins, he creates a model taken up by two more Caribbean novelists: James, whose searingly violent yet lyrical tale of Black revolt against Jamaican enslavement fuses an enslaved woman rebel’s plot with the conventional novelistic plot of a housemaid’s aspiration to great house romance; and Scott, in whose phantasmagorical, multiracial history of Trinidad plantation heirs honor their debt to the creativity of the oppressed outside the great house windows. The chapter ends with visions of transformed, inclusive, after-Empire Caribbean homes and intriguing great Caribbean house library scenes.