Abstract:

Colonial Affections examines formulations of intimacy in twentieth-century texts of British and Caribbean encounter. The Anglophone Caribbean is uniquely positioned in the (post)colonial imaginary: perceived as islands far-flung from the center of British Empire and yet somehow culturally familiar in that center. This duality means that the period of Caribbean decolonization, between the emergence of Pan-Africanism in the 1930's and the first West Indian national independence of 1962, is rich with material that explores the contradictions of Anglophone Caribbean belonging. Colonial Affections reads a variety of literary and cultural texts from the Caribbean and England--essays, fiction, films, and archival documents--that show how forms of colonial intimacy produce forms of affection between Caribbean and British subjects. These colonial affections are peculiar, emerging from contestations and contradictions, affinities and disavowals.

In Chapter 1 George Lamming's account of the 1956 Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in Paris, an essay marked by his uncertainties about black artistic affinity, becomes an occasion for re-considering his book The Pleasures of Exile . I think less about Lamming's famous appropriation of the figure of Caliban and more about his reflections on the ambivalent pleasures of colonial belonging.

In Chapter 2 I analyze CLR James's hybrid memoir Beyond a Boundary and his letters to his wife Constance Webb in order to consider how James's attachments to England and Englishness, America and Americana, are formed and theorized through performances (especially cricket and film).

Chapter 3 reads archival and sociological documents surrounding homosexuality and black migration in England as archives of hidden or illegitimate intimacy in England. The letters and memos of east London borough councilor Edith Ramsay, a paper trail left by the newly formed Institute of Race Relations, and an audio interview with Jamaican dancer Richie Riley form part of a web of cultural information on blackness and homosexuality in post-war England.

Finally, in Chapter 4 I read Andrew Salkey's novel of middle-class migrant uncertainty, Escape to an Autumn Pavement , alongside films by Basil Dearden (Pool of London and Sapphire ) and Roy Ward Baker (Flame in the Streets ) to think about the uniquely intense, sometimes violent, character of colonial intimacies across class.