Most literary histories are written in lockstep with national stories. It is perfectly clear what such co-ordination brings to nationalism: it makes that national story deeper and longer, more rooted in its territory. It is less clear that literary history benefits. For a start many of the books herded into such national literary histories were written long before these nations ever existed: to read, say, the writings of Christopher Columbus as part of US literature is to misplace the historical and geographical co-ordinates necessary to understand Columbus. But even within the modern era, dominated by nation-states, literature itself has rarely...

Brooklyn 1974. ‘Sassy Antiguan’ Jamaica Kincaid visits the West Indian Day Parade, and finds herself, like anthropologist Karen McCarthy Brown, in a ‘tropical city’ in Brooklyn. After racing across the Manhattan Bridge in a taxi, she wanders the parade route on Eastern Parkway, one of Brooklyn’s two grand boulevards, designed by Central Park architects Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux in 1866. Framed by stately apartment buildings and a tree-lined median that separates the main roadway from a narrow outlet, Eastern Parkway stretches from Evergreen Cemetery in Queens, past Ralph Avenue, the boundary between Brooklyn and Queens. It continues by...

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao(2007) by Dominican-American author Junot Díaz is an encyclopaedic novel that presents itself as having much to say about history, literature, popular culture, and the experience of exile. As one might expect from such a wide-ranging yet oblique novel, it invites numerous types of readings. Among them, the most literalist approach is one that takes Díaz’s plot on its own tragicomic terms, seeing it as the pathetic story of a Dominican-American science fiction-obsessed ‘nerd’ named Oscar De León and the two previous generations of his family. The novel offers a fragmented account of...

This essay reads the imagined space of the American Topics in Leslie Marmon Silko’s novels,Almanac of the DeadandGardens in the Dunes, against the European Enlightenment configuration of racialised bodies and disease.¹ For European colonial invaders, the lands surrounding the present-day USA-Mexico border invoked images of the tropics. And yet calling this (in fact sub-tropical) part of the globe ‘the tropics’ was a way of defining a culturally alien and environmentally distinctive landscape against temperate Europe. As Europeans invented the tropicality of the Americas, they did not turn them into tropical Edens, as they presumed they would. The...

In the summer of 1847, while the US armies of Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott were on their way to conquering Mexico City, the US adventurer and proto-archaeologist John Lloyd Stephens, famous ‘discoverer’ of many Maya ruins, joined the first US steamship voyage from Boston to Bremerhaven, being the official representative of the Ocean Steam Navigating Company, to whom the ship belonged. Although the steamer was beaten by its British rival, the Britannia, Stephens landed safely in Bremen, attended official dinners in celebration of the revolutionary technology that would introduce a new age of transportation, and went on a one-day...

Bulldozers uproot ancient rainforest and the sacred mountains of indigenous tribal peoples, explosives blast away the outer crust of earth and giant trucks move in, digging their claws deep into the exposed bauxite ore. A reddish dust fills the air, eventually settling on every leaf, roof and lung for miles around. The bauxite ore is washed, strained, baked and dried into a fine powdery dust. Poured into the deep holds of ships, the alumina crosses the world in search of cheap electricity, drawn to the raging rivers and geological forces that have been tamed to feed the smelters. Into the...

We all recognise the back-handed compliment of one of the most familiar formulas for comparison: so and so (fill in the name of a national patriot/founding father of another nation) is the George Washington of his country. Who can miss the assumption of superiority in the presumed equal sign? The equation puts the second term, the other, first but doesn’t fool anyone in the process. No spectres shadow these comparisons, at least not with the subtle kind of haunting that Benedict Anderson finds in José Rizal’s (first great novelist and founding father of the modern Philippine nation) famous Filipino nationalist...

‘It is hard to ignore the hotels’, Ian Strachan begins hisParadise and Plantation: ‘They rise like mammoths of iron and concrete above the homes, the office buildings, the trees of New Providence, island of my birth’.¹ He goes on to argue that Caribbean hotels are modern plantations—locally-run but foreign-owned businesses that create a product for customers overseas, but instead of sugar or tobacco what they offer is a holiday experience in ‘paradise’.²

The subject of this essay is a rather different hotel. A slightly run-down gingerbread mansion today more likely to find journalists, aid workers, military personnel, documentary...

Since the 1970s, scholars have perceived the revolutionary moment in Trinidadian literature as taking place in the 1930s. TheBeacongroup, which emerged from a coterie of 1930s Trinidadian writers, was perceived as an inspired, iconoclastic precursor to the internationally-acclaimed 1950s generation of Caribbean writers. Post-1970s research, however, has drawn attention to theBeacongroup’s occasional conservatism, such as Alfred Mendes’ devaluation of Africa’s cultural wealth.³ The problematic schisms of theBeacongroup add extra complexity to the historiography of Trinidadian literature and call for a closer reading of Port of Spain’s literary geography. Rather than the monologic imposition of...

A micronation might be located in an apartment, a garden, or a caravan, on a pile of sand or a submerged reef. Some are born of social discontent and idealism; others are created by pranksters, for a laugh; still others from the desire to avoid paying tax; some are fraudulent money-making schemes; and some charge a fee for citizenship, or even a noble title. All are performative fictions—inventions—unrecognised by other ‘legitimate’ nations. Micronations generally are speculative. The online Invent-a-Micronation Contest organised by BuildingBlog,¹ is dedicated to architectural as well as urban speculation, and to landscape futures. Its 2009...

This essay explores the idea of Guayana as a space of cultural imagination for the American Tropics. The notion of ‘exploration’ is perhaps particularly apposite here as ‘Guayana’ defies any stable physical delimitation. The national societies of the Guayana region—Brazil, the Guianas, and Venezuela—quite overtly construct themselves through a contrast between the historically settled coasts and a still-unexplored or unconquered interior.¹ The fluvial border created by the connection of the Amazon, Orinoco, and Rio Negro rivers thereby constitutes the frontier between the imagined space of Guayana and the historically constituted space of national and post-colonial identity. In the...

In a recent call for papers for a conference on Léon-Gontran Damas (hosted by the Postcolonial Research Group of the University of Antwerp in December 2008), the organisers asked: ‘Why has Guyanese literature (in Dutch, French, and English) remained thus far overlooked, particularly within Caribbean scholarship and more generally speaking in postcolonial literary studies?’¹ If indeed literature from and about the Guianas has been overlooked, it is not because of its scarceness. Restricting ourselves for a moment to Suriname, the geographic centre of the Guianas, we would note that in 2002 the indefatigable Michiel van Kempen defended a nearly 1,500-page...

Tropical nature evokes a distinctive kind of geographical setting with its own characteristic flora and fauna.¹ Its representation, however, has been varied, shaped by distinct perceptual frames and ideologies that in turn have produced an array of visual images and verbal accounts. During the early nineteenth century the study of nature was closely intertwined with science and religion. Alexander von Humboldt, the renowned Prussian naturalist and explorer who travelled extensively throughout Latin America, argued that the key to understanding the divinely-ordered natural world was through careful observation. He encouraged scientists and artists to travel and observe nature, especially in the...