a high wind in jamaica by richard hughes

Each reading illustrates a particular poetic strategy of accessing the past and presents a distinct political outlook on memory. It sets out to chart systematically the ways in which literature and memory intersect, and offers readings of three seminal Black Atlantic novels. This book is concerned with how literature performs as memory. Recently, however, fiction writers have ventured to ‘re-member’ the Black Atlantic.

There is a prevailing desire to forget: While victims of the African diaspora tried to flee the sites of trauma, enlightened Westerners preferred to be oblivious to the discomforting complicity between their enlightenment and chattel slavery. The Atlantic slave trade continues to haunt the cultural memories of Africa, Europe and the Americas. As eminent Jamaican intellectual Stuart Hall explained, ‘identity is in part always a narrative It is that which is narrated in one’s own self.’ As this chapter shows, the legacy of many of the narratives produced in the immediate postwar period played a vital part in reconfiguring such British working-class identities. The texts depict potentials for unity with white working-class Britons, creating space for a pluralised ‘Britishness’ inclusive (at least in part) of blackness. The works of Caribbean and white British authors of the 1950s are essential to understanding these formations, recounting the daily struggles of Commonwealth migrants in postwar Britain and attempts at promoting their accommodation among working-class Britons yet, perhaps more significantly, they also capture, in their most embryonic form, the initial configurations of a collective intersectional working-class politics. Though the iconic anti-racist and black liberation struggles would only occur from the late-1960s onwards, their roots are to be found in the social and cultural formations of the immediate postwar period. However, such change was not achieved painlessly with the migrant experience of class inseparable from their experience of a racism ubiquitous at both institutional and interpersonal levels and its amelioration (however imperfect) the result of decades of collective struggle. The arrival of Commonwealth migrants to Britain following World War Two signalled the beginning of a significant change in the country’s class composition.

A high wind in jamaica by richard hughes