Chapter 5 - From Novels of the Caribbean, to Caribbean Novels

Summary

This essay explores several Emancipation-era novels reflecting the prevalence of the cross-cultural exchanges that defined Caribbean life at mid-nineteenth century, processes that are not readily apparent when looking at the region’s fiction through the lens of discrete anglophone, francophone, or hispanophone literary studies. Despite their different linguistic and cultural orientations, novelists like E. L. Joseph, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, and Juan José Nieto share an engagement with issues and themes that continue to define Caribbean literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Thus, even as the conditions of each novel’s production are unique – whether created by a Cuban-born abolitionist writing of her native island from Spain (Avellaneda), or by an affiliate of Trinidad’s post-Emancipation planter class (Joseph), or by a political refugee from Colombia (Nieto) – they all exhibit a self-reflexive concept of caribeñidad or Caribbeanness. In so doing they also mark a point when the novel of the Caribbean became the Caribbean novel.