The Limits of the Postcolonial Theory in the Caribbean Context: “Nearing Forty” as a Case Study

Abstract

The present paper examines the limits of the postcolonial theory as a critical and historical approach to the Caribbean: its history, its literary and cultural products. To contextualize this examination, the paper starts by comparing the approaches of two contemporary historians to the region’s history, namely, B. W. Higman and Carrie Gibson who traversed and chronicled the region’s checkered past. The comparison aims to isolate the exclusivist-inclusivist dynamics at work in Higman’s linear approach in A Concise History of the Caribbean and Gibson’s episodic approach in Empire’s Crossroads: A History of the Caribbean from Columbus to the Present Day. The paper, then, addresses the analogous manifestations of these dynamics in literary criticism. Concretely, the dynamics are traced in the postcolonial critical approach to Caribbean literature via conducting a close reading of Derek Walcott’s “Nearing Forty” and a critical assessment of John Lennard’s ‘postcolonial’ reading thereof as a case study. The paper concludes with a call for similar reevaluations of the corpora of Caribbean writers and a critical (re)assessment of the attendant postcolonial readings that framed them for long. Being mainly library-based, this paper relies on books, articles, reviews, and interviews.