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Shrabani Basu
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Gendered
Identity and the
Lost Female
Hybridity as a Partial Experience in
the Anglophone Caribbean
Performances
Shrabani Basu
Gendered Identity and the Lost Female
Shrabani Basu
Gendered Identity
and the Lost Female
Hybridity as a Partial Experience
in the Anglophone Caribbean
Performances
Shrabani Basu
Department of English
Deshabandhu Mahavidyalaya
Chittaranjan, India
ISBN 978-981-19-4966-1 ISBN 978-981-19-4967-8 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4967-8
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
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retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
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The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore
189721, Singapore
About This Book
The book, in its most succinct form, is an exploration of Postcolonial

‘hybrid’ experience in the late twentieth century Anglophone Caribbean
performance from a feminist perspective. By performance, I mean theatre,
calypso, carnival and chutney music, and how they represent the post-
colonial ideation of a ‘hybrid’ performer. Besides looking into the works
of playwrights like Derek Walcott, Errol John, Trevor Rhone, Mustapha
Matura and Michael Gikes, the study also examines identity polemics in
the works of performers like the female calypsonians, the skimpy mas
dancers of Trinidad Carnival, and the Indo-Caribbean female singers of
Chutney music.
The objectives of this book are to:
● Form a critical argument around the existing narrative of cultural

hybrid experience in the Caribbean imaginary.
● Explore aesthetic representations of hybridity as a process of post-
colonial identity construction of female participants in Caribbean
performances.
● Comment on the nature of a gendered power equation in the
hybrid experience of female characters in the plays, as well as female
participants in the Anglophone Caribbean performances.
● Analyze certain theatrical texts, calypso and chutney lyrics of
Caribbean Anglophone playwrights and performers, and also explore
certain case studies, against particular cultural backdrops.
v
vi ABOUT THIS BOOK
● Question the pertinence of the ongoing practice of connecting the

poetics of hybridity to a poetics of equality—particularly focusing on
various performance practices.
● Signal at the present nature of things, and a possible future of the
hybrid identity narratives. Where is the postcolonial identity polemics
headed to? What new grounds are possible in any further study of
these narratives?
The book intends to address a few questions germane to the multicul-

tural narrative of contemporary Caribbean imaginary: how does hybrid
experience differ across race and gender in the Caribbean postcolonial
discourse? In an attempt to create a pan-Caribbean multi-cultural iden-
tity, is there a forced assimilation, glossing over differences? Does the
hybrid experience in the Caribbean performance have a bias against female
narratives? To address these concerns, I am consulting works of Homi
K. Bhabha, Nederveen Pieterse, Shalini Puri and others in an attempt
to approximate different facets of the hybridity discourse. This gendered
study of postcolonial hybrid experience would be a hitherto unexplored
consideration of Caribbean theatre and performance.
Contents
1 Independence and Oil Boom: Hybridity

and the Changing Face of Caribbean Gender
Identity 1
1.1 Political and Economic Change 3
1.2 Socio-Cultural Change 7
1.3 Gender Politics in the Caribbean Before and Around
1972 9
Works Cited 25
2 Race, Performance, Identity, and the Possibility
of an Incomplete Articulation of Hybridity 27
2.1 Construction of Racial and Ethnic Identity
in the Caribbean 27
2.2 Concept of Hybridity and Its Incomplete Articulation 38
2.3 The Interconnection of Drama, Calypso and Carnival 50
Works Cited 68
3 “To Put Two Cold Coins”: The Polarized Identities
in Caribbean Drama 73
3.1 Folklore, Rituals and Carnival: Many Faces
of Caribbean Theatrical Performances 74
3.2 Dream on Monkey Mountain and Ti Jean and His
Brothers: Walcott’s Myth of Masculine Hybridity 82
vii
viii CONTENTS
3.3 Internalized Hegemony and the Exaggeration

of Complacence: Trevor D. Rhone’s Old Story Time 98
3.4 Motley of Choice and Change: Errol John’s Moon
on a Rainbow Shawl 109
3.5 Rawle Gibbon’s “ I Lawah”: The Canboulay in Theatre 119
3.6 “woman like you… like me”: Pat Cumper’s “The
Rapist” 126
Works Cited 140
4 Carnival as a Partial Expression of Gendered Reality 143
4.1 Carnival: Tradition or a Modern Bacchanalia 146
4.2 Bakhtin and the Idea of the Carnivalesque 149
4.3 Carnival as Ritual 152
4.4 Canboulay: Emergence of a Carnival of Color 158
4.5 Carnival and the Gender Equation 162
4.6 The Changing Face of the Carnival 176
Works Cited 185
5 “Instead of Having One Race, You Know I Got Two”:
Calypso and Chutney as Voices from the Fringe 187
5.1 Calypso and the Absence of “Jean” and “Dinah” 188
5.2 Music Off the Jahaj: Music of the Indo-Caribbean 207
Works Cited 222
6 Conclusion 225
Works Cited 231
Bibliography 233
Index 243
About the Author
Shrabani Basu teaches English at Deshabandhu Mahavidyalaya, Chit-

taranjan, India. She has worked on cultural hybridity, marginalization, and
performance in the Caribbean Anglophone context. She holds an M.A.,
M.Phil., and Ph.D. from The English and Foreign Languages University
(EFLU), Hyderabad, India. She is presently working on horror and the
cultural affect of spirit possession on Indian women. Her article “The Foil
and the Quicksand: the Image of the ‘Veil’ and the failure of Abjection in
Iranian Diasporic Horror” was published in Cinema: Journal of Philosophy
and the Moving Image.
ix
CHAPTER 1
Independence and Oil Boom: Hybridity

and the Changing Face of Caribbean Gender
Identity
In the economic and sociopolitical upheaval following the Oil Boom,

cultural practices changed from the colonial–colonized polarity of the
post-independence Caribbean societies to an acknowledgment of the
multiplicity of economic and hence societal nuances. These shifting
cultural changes brought about some visible alterations in social life.
These modifications were acknowledged and incorporated into the racial
memory as a communal experience and were externalized in various art
forms. As social experience clashed with the racio-communal memory,
the cultural depiction of the lived experience became more complicated.
Hence, while some opined that the male was an endangered species due
to their increasing absence in the Caribbean social milieu, others noticed
the increasing marginalization of women in cultural iconography and
the postcolonial experience. This was more obvious in the performance
practices, where the audience had participatory access to the event.
The present study is meant to explore the possibilities of a gendered
argument regarding the experience of cultural hybridity. Though the
focus will be culture specific—to be precise about hybridity being a
predominantly masculine experience in the West Indian performance
tradition referring to theater, calypso and carnival within a specific time-
frame in the history of the Caribbean—the central argument has a wider
applicability. The book intends to address a few questions germane to the
multicultural narrative of contemporary Caribbean imaginary: how does
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022
S. Basu, Gendered Identity and the Lost Female,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4967-8_1
2 S. BASU
the hybrid experience differ across race and gender in the Caribbean post-
colonial? In an attempt to create a pan-Caribbean multicultural identity, is
there forced assimilation, glossing over differences? Does the hybrid expe-
rience in the Caribbean performance have a bias against female narratives?
To address these concerns, the study will refer to the works of Homi K.
Bhabha, Nederveen Pieterse, Shalini Puri and others in an attempt to
approximate different facets of hybridity discourse.
Hybridity as a part of the multicultural discourse has a tendency
of claiming an autonomy from prejudices and regression. However, if
we follow the discursive trajectory of any sociopolitical experience, it
becomes clearer that any claim of forbearance from prejudices or eman-
cipatory polity can be something to be wary of. It has to be socially and
culturally conditioned making it largely relative to spacio-cultural coordi-
nates. Thus, the said polity is also liable to be governed by the socially
constructed power relations making it subjective, in some ways partisan
and in the context of this study, gendered. There is a practice of seeing art
as a kind of transcendental autonomy, untouched by the humdrum busi-
ness of everyday life. The artist, thus, is considered an individual who
is alienated from society. S/he exists in a kind of bio-dome in which
s/he is permitted the luxury of behavior usually considered unacceptable
or subversive in others. This practice fortunately has become quite anti-
quated as we strive now to posit the artist in his/her time, analyzing the
art form not unique and autonomous but as any social activity molded by
time and space. The concerns gain a larger momentum in the Caribbean
Anglophone society, where long traditions of migration, settlement, and
reclamations create a deep heterogeneity. Historically, the acts of severe
limitation and verbal silencing, had developed a practice of “performing”
their concerns. Yet, while many have argued for a revaluing and legit-
imizing of our historical, cultural experience, few, if any, have been clear
about the situation of women within cultural resistance and the specific
cultural identity of Caribbean women within the movement of creative
arts.
The objective of this monograph is to explore the performance tradi-
tion of Caribbean, especially Trinidad and Barbados, during and after the
1973 Oil Boom1 and to investigate the changing terrain of cultural artic-
ulation of a hybrid individual, checking whether this articulation becomes
gendered at any point. For the purpose of cohesion, there have been
instances of extrapolation from the analyses of countries like Trinidad and
1 INDEPENDENCE AND OIL BOOM: HYBRIDITY … 3
Tobago, Jamaica, and to a certain extent Barbados, to the wider Anglo-

phone Caribbean. While there is considerable similarity in the historical
experiences of the Anglophone Caribbean nations—British hegemony,
indentureship, slavery—there is enough cultural diversity between and
within the different national cultures, to make the cultural experiences
unique. Hence, any generalizations based on the analysis of experiences
for the above-mentioned countries in the wider Caribbean context should
be considered with caution by the reader. It is, therefore, crucial to
ground each of the ideas of exploration in this book in its sociohistorical
context.
1.1 Political and Economic Change

Oil industry in the Caribbean, especially in Trinidad, had been an
important resource for the British colonizers around the middle of the
nineteenth century when Merrimac, a United States-based organization
had dug for oil in the Pitch lake area of La Brea or La Bray (not to be
confused with the major oil fields of the same name in Los Angeles).
Though the oil produce from La Brea had declined around the 1980s, at
a time, the oil produce from Trinidad was the source of the majority of
the petroleum and asphalt yield under British control:
Trinidad was a British colony from the year 1797 to 1962. During all those
years, what really mattered to the British Government, of course, was not
what the island could produce in a world context, but how important the
island was, actual and potential, in a British Empire context. In 1938, for
example, Trinidad was producing some 38% of the British Empire oil. In
1930 the percentage was even higher, over 40%. (Mulchasingh, 73)
Following the initial oil find, the oil industry at Trinidad had gradu-
ally established itself as a major economic source for the British colonial
administration. With the appearance of the People’s Nationalist Move-
ment (PNM) party in 1956, there was an increased attempt to utilize
the economic benefit of the oil industry for the nation. Incidentally,
during the same year, Texaco had merged with, and effectively taken over
Trinidad Leaseholds Ltd. leading to major investments. Niblett quotes
James Millett:
4 S. BASU
The coming of the oil giant was to mark a decisive shift, not only
towards big capital investment, but towards big United States invest-
ment in the country. It was the most significant step in the establishment
of US hegemonic control of the country’s economy even before British
overlordship was terminated by the winning of independence in 1962.
Immediately, Texaco upgraded the throughput capacity of the Pointe-a-
Pierre refinery from 75,000 to 124,000 barrels per day; and plans were
laid for further expansion to 250,000 barrels, thereby making it one of the
largest refineries under US control operating outside the continental USA.
(29)
This also gave rise to an attempt of the then Prime Minister Eric Williams
to nationalize the petroleum industry, even deferring his initial announce-
ment of retirement. Post-1973, there was a new political rhetoric that
endorsed the oil-oriented social changes and its effect on various identity
politics, stressing the questions of entitlement and rights on one’s own
ecological resources (Niblett, 30). There was a question of infrastruc-
tural and developmental enterprises which rested on the utilization of oil
rights. The Oil Boom, therefore, became associated with national renewal,
progress, and economic advancement in political parlance. Promises were
made based on the oil rights, and there were tangible objects of progress
that became increasingly visible to the common population. This changed
the earlier import-oriented national economy to a new export-oriented
and apparently more robust economic policies. Williams pressed on the
importance of Trinidad’s entry into the progressive world of petro-
chemical modernity, thereby increasing the general level of education,
opportunities, and thereby ambition of ordinary people.
Williams saw petroleum-based industrialization as the quickest way to

remove Trinidad’s stigma of slavery, indentured labour, and colonialism
derived from its sugar industry. It was not by accident that Williams chose
the Point Lisas estate, an old sugar plantation covering 672 hectares on
the south-west coast of Trinidad. Point Lisas was to symbolise the creation
of a new Trinidad that had overcome its woeful colonial past. The new
industrialization was to bring racial harmony ‘where sugar divided.’ An
industrialized Trinidad would be a wealthy, modern nation without ethnic
and class conflict. (Holton, qtd in Niblett, 32)
As a result, there was a stress on a more inclusive creolization ethos in the

social context, where the multiple ethnicities and cultures of the space had
to come together to preserve national identity. Both creolization and the

oil industry were put forward as the new face of the island nations which
guaranteed peace, progress, and racial harmony.2 My purpose is not to
look into the authenticity of such a claim, but to assess the changes that
such a considerable degree of restructuring brought about.
In the economic and sociopolitical upheaval following the Oil Boom,
cultural practices like dramatics, carnival and calypso changed from the
typical rejoicing of independence in 1962 with articulations against colo-
nial exploitation and inequality to a more problematic take on the
changing tides of society. The colonial-colonized polarity gave way to
an acknowledgment of the multiplicity of economic and hence soci-
etal nuances. The shifting cultural change brought about some visible
changes in social life. The yard life of the recently independent Caribbean
became more fluid as the social order changed according to the vagaries
of time and space. The process of modernization following the Oil
Boom changed the texture of the social order as values became more
standardized and the communal spirit gave way to social experience.
These visible social changes were acknowledged and incorporated into the
racial memory as an experience and were duly rendered in art forms. As
social experience clashed with the racio-communal memory, the cultural
depiction of human perceptions regarding these changes became more
complicated. With human perceptions becoming more astute, there is an
enlarged access and addressing of the increasing variety of experiences
and consequently, the portrayal of the changes became problematic as
it was felt that it was partial to certain aspects of life without doing
justice to the rest. Hence while some opined that the male was an endan-
gered species due to their increasing absence in the Caribbean social
milieu, some saw the increasing mariginalization of women in cultural
iconography and postcolonial experience. This was more obvious in the
performance traditions, where the audience had participatory access to
the event. This phenomenon was furthered by the visible socio-cultural
changes all around.
The Caribbean society is often considered to be under patriarchy in
absentia, affected by the matrilocal residential arrangements as well as
gender-specific migration around the years of the Oil Boom. The house-
yard residential unit embodies the traditional settlement pattern of the
domestic sphere. More visible among the Afro-Caribbean communities,
this yard unit is usually owned and headed by a woman, containing her
own house and those of her adult children, who have separated from the
6 S. BASU
principal unit after marriage or with the increase in subsequent gener-

ations. Patterned after the conventional African round yards, the unit
circle the matriarch, who is supposed to be leading the domestic activi-
ties within the space. Thus the yards become, in essence, women-centered
spaces where the women are the principal dwellers in the daytime. Besides
the day-to-day domestic arrangements, crucial activities like marriages and
first confinements of women are conventionally planned in their mother’s
yard.
Despite significant departures from the conventional patterns of
matrilocality, Caribbean ethnic or cultural settler communities, within the
archipelago or other geographic locations overseas, are connected by intri-
cately connected engagements of individuals, objects, money, and ideas.
This arrangement stretches the spatial perceptions of the Caribbean soci-
etal form providing it with a cosmopolitan turn beyond the national or
cultural boundaries. The expectations of the yard life have dissolved, and
the power hierarchy within has changed to a different order. Thus, while
certain inherently “Caribbean” locus have lasted, other economic and
cultural layerization have replaced the conventional yard polity. Unlike
the traditional economic dependence motif for the female populace,
Caribbean women usually exhibit high economic autonomy. Legacy of
slavery and male-centric expatriation often evolved into a social situa-
tion where women had to fend for the family and themselves, leading
to equal land ownership with the male populace. This condition is the
alleged factor behind women’s wariness against patriarchal control, thus
providing the practical basis of matrifocal3 society. Therefore, there has
been a marked preference for education and economic autonomy among
Caribbean women across class and race, with a partiality for vertical
mobility.
However, around the 1980s, employment and regular wage paying
jobs for women had a marked increase. Interestingly, this was also the
time when due to the Oil fields and economic investments from the US-
based companies there was a penchant for a Western family myth with
a male breadwinner at the center. The destabilization deepened in the
1990s with the realignment of the idea of the superpowers with the end
of the Cold War. Along with the global political reconstruction, there was
a sharp reduction in development aid and a deduction of national exports
(especially in the European blocs) with the implementation of the North
American Free Trade. This sudden change from the growing industrializa-
tion led to the fragmentation of the family life in the Caribbean, as there
were frequent cases of the male bread earner either moving away from
the family or abandoning them altogether. This shift with the overlap-
ping case of growing economic autonomy of the women left the mother
or wife of the house at the helm of the family. Readers are to note that
neither were these conditions universally applicable in the Caribbean soci-
eties nor were the economic autonomy uniform within a particular class
stratum. Regardless, these two parallel conditions lead to a paradoxical
view of Caribbean women: on one hand they were portrayed as the over-
burdened miseries who strive in the absence of the menfolk; and on the
other, they were the viragos who emasculate and incidentally evict their
men folk from their rightful arena.
Within the Caribbean regional diversity of ethnicity, class, languages and

religion there is an ideological unity of patriarchy, of female subordina-
tion and dependence. Yet there is also a vibrant living tradition of female
economic autonomy, of female headed households and of a family structure
in which men are often marginal and absentee. So, Caribbean gender rela-
tions are a double paradox: of patriarchy within a system of matrifocal and
matrilocal families; and of domestic and state patriarchy coexisting with
the economic independence of women. The roots of this contemporary
paradoxical situation lie in colonialism. (Momsen, 45)
The segment quoted above comprises the view most popularly believed by
critics on Caribbean gender politics. It is generally held that the Caribbean
society is an example of matrifocality within patriarchy where the women
are gradually earning social and economic prominence thereby rendering
the male community invisible and marginalized. One of the objectives
of this study is to seek the politics of gender relation in the Caribbeans
based on this statement and to research the possibility of its validation or
the lack of it.
1.2 Socio-Cultural Change

In Caribbean society, a certain degree of gemeinschaften can be seen in
the yard life—a collective sense of loyalty towards each other. Though
it changes after the Oil Boom, the communal basis of shared existence
persists. Certain obvious changes are, however, perceived. Women coming
out of the yard to replace the absent male in the social hemisphere; and
yet as a communal being the female is still observed to be tied to the yard
8 S. BASU
while men go abroad, thereby achieving a hybrid status. Gesellschaft , on

the other hand, emphasizing secondary relationships rather than familial
or community ties was mostly absent in Caribbean social life till the Oil
Boom. It outlines less individual loyalty to the social order, as there is a
cohesion derived from the division of labor and is thus more prone to
class conflicts. As society changes to accommodate its economic interest,
men leave the Caribbean shores to work in the oil refineries in the Gulf.
Hence women leave the yard to support the household. The community
feeling is undermined except in several rituals and performances including
plays, carnival and calypso. They become performances to celebrate the
lost communal life through an established social network.
The fall of the nationalized economy and open market with steady
inflation increased the migration of the populace (mainly male) to Europe
and America. This further complicated the response to the growing idea
of hybridity. Men, with their increased exposure to the Western ideologies
became more vocal about it, while women were made busy at home and
having minor jobs in the local towns. Although it somewhat increased
female literacy and women holding jobs, the exposure to American
and European philosophies was mostly limited to men. These topsy-
turvy conditions, where men were largely absent from the low-income
economic arena, yet were in control of the ideologies that guaranteed the
striation of the economic groups, lead to certain shifts in the representa-
tive performances of the greater sociopolitical and economic environment
of the Caribbean islands, particularly in Trinidad and Jamaica. Playwrights
focused their themes on the male experiencing hybridity and imparting
it to women with a messiah-like condescension. Calypsos changed their
themes from banana boat songs of tired men to farewell to the Caribbean
shores.4
There was a different version of a “good life” projected by the Williams
government, with promises that money will not be a problem anymore.
Very similar to the idea of an American dream, this assurance created an
urban cultural politics, different from the sugarcane-centered plantation
culture of the Caribbean before. Material vectors replaced the ecolog-
ical ones, and the conventional yard culture came out as an uneasy and
outmoded tie. Interestingly, this decline of the yard culture also took
away the already fraying ties with the mythic “motherland” insistence
of the Afro and the Indo-Caribbean individuals. Shalini Puri called this
the creation of “a hybrid Trinidadian national subject” (48), whose prin-
cipal loyalty was to the developing urban nation. Niblett quotes Eric
Williams’ inaugural address after the 1962 Independence, where Williams

anticipates such a “Trinidadian” individual:
There can be no Mother India for those whose ancestors came from India
[...]. There can be no Mother Africa for those of African origin [...].
There can be no Mother England and no dual loyalties [...] There can
be no Mother China [...] and there can be no Mother Syria or no Mother
Lebanon. A nation, like an individual, can have only one Mother. The only
Mother we recognize is Mother Trinidad and Tobago, and Mother cannot
discriminate between her children. (Williams, qtd in Niblett, 31)
This new Trinidad was supposed to be a petroleum-led modern world,

where the stigmas of slavery, indentureship, migrations, plantation-based
retrograde divisiveness, and ethnic conflicts would be bygones. As the
material urbanity kicked in, the ethnic culturalist ties and demarcations
of the communities changed their intensity. With it, the matrifocal yard
changed into the global patriarchal family unit; and the racially integrative
function of the oil economy gave way to other social inequalities.
1.3 Gender Politics in the Caribbean

Before and Around 1972
The construction of hegemonic gender politics cannot be grasped beyond
the constant flux within the disparate racial and gender identities. In her
contribution to Engendering History, Beckles traces the evolution of the
representative Caribbean women from their legacy of being at the bottom
of the power structure in the slavery era, reconciling the expectations of
biological and economic production from them. In spite of the proposed
economic autonomy earlier, this imposed political positioning authenti-
cated the black woman’s experience as an essential variation from the slave
mode of production. Conversely, shifts in the construction of male gender
identities also conditions the construction of femininity thereby affecting
the gender dynamics. However, the construction of Caribbean femininity
bears a departure from the same in other ethnocultural spaces, owing to
the distinctive experience of Caribbean women.
Initiated readers would recognize the fact the basics of gynocriticism
consider the autonomy of authentic female experiences as the founda-
tion of female gender identity. It also behooves us to acknowledge that
authentic experiences are such organic and disparate affairs that they
10 S. BASU
can vary across the ethnic, cultural, and social coordinates. Hence, one
cannot assume an analysis of Caribbean women on extrapolations of
any ideation of women experience elsewhere. In stressing the unique-
ness of the experience of Afro-Caribbean women (and holding them as
separate from the experiences of Indo-Caribbean women), we can argue
that any feminist study of the Caribbean cultural coordinates should
critically review representations of feminine realities against varied racial
and cultural parameters. The range of factors conditioning the construct
includes ethnic conventions, learned larger social expectations, environ-
mental elements, economic scaffoldings as well as historically situated
political determinants. Alternatively, we should also accept the possibility
of socially produced historical accounts, colored by the interest and affil-
iations of those who either create them or authenticate their credibility.
Thus, the texts and testimonies of the Caribbean female representations,
may also be guilty of being derivative assessments of biased male scientific
inquiry bereft of authentic documentary evidence.
The argument at hand also debates the possibility of the claim that
in a targeted societal arena men are becoming increasingly vulnerable
and at a threat of losing their agency. This supposed vulnerability of
the Caribbean male populace,5 in particular, has been a central discourse
in popular culture thus influencing the research works in social science.
A popular “male in crisis” discourse posits Caribbean males as socially
marginalized entities with few or no agency over domestic, educational,
and occupational spheres. Benita Parry noticed an “emerging sympathy
and support” for the marginalized Jamaican male in the June 1996 edition
of Daily Gleaner, with loud media demands to “leave our men alone”
and “let’s stop the male bashing” and through attempts to reconstruct a
more constructive image of the Jamaican men as otherwise model spouses
and parents (Parry, 85). It should be noticed that the concern about
the then supposed plight of males has never been similarly expressed
relating to the societal positions of women, particularly in the education
field, regionally, or globally. Odette Parry in “Gendered Methodologies
and Feminist Awakenings” hints that despite emerging feminist concerns,
gender marginalization has never been a thematic concern in the larger
non-social science research community as there has never been much
funding either available or allocated on the issue. Her research devel-
oped around this topic unearthed a rather mundane and shallow reason
behind this peripherality of women-centered research in the Caribbeans.
According to her, the field of education is one area where the Caribbean
males were particularly felt to be underachievers and was made more

important in its effort and incidental success of attracting more research
funding. “The study on male educational underachievement was funded
by UNICEF who had previously demonstrated commitment to the study
of males by funding a large study of masculinity in the region” (Parry,
85).
Pedro Noguera in “The Crisis of the Black Male in Comparative
Perspective” questions this discourse by pointing at words such as “cri-
sis”, “at risk”, “marginal” and “endangered” which are used to describe
the plight of male (particularly black) in America, Britain and the Anglo-
phone Caribbean. Although he does not dispute the broad points which
describe the condition of males in the socioeconomic stratum, he high-
lights the fact that in such stratum the women are thereby rendered
invisible.6 Moreover, as he points out that the term “crisis’ pertains to
a temporary and recent urgency. He argues whether the “crisis” faced by
the black men is any way different from those faced by black women in
similar conditions or whether these are any way different or unconnected
from those of the past. Noguera also argues that the concept of marginal-
ized men is a construct making the overt conjecture that men experience
similar conditions despite threats as white males and that the issues remain
unchanged among any particular ethnic community.
The historical subordination of women to men within the limits of
pervasive patriarchal order is an established fact, along with its hierarchical
precedence of men’s life taking potential over women’s life-sustaining
one. And yet, there is also a less researched scope of economic and sexual
domination of one class of men over the other. Miller explains that the
patriarchal order has historically been marked with an explicit “inability
to deal humanely and equitably with men of rival groups or communi-
ties which present a real challenge or constitute meaningful opposition
to one’s group” (qtd in Lindsay, 58). Though the affiliations and alle-
giance of the wider gender groups may have switched from familial and
kinship claims to city, nation, religion, class, or race, the inherent issue
of patriarchy’s inability to deal humanely the individuals of other lineages
remains the same. Thus, those “alien men” stay marginalized and subdued
through “remote manipulation” of their “access to commodities, services,
capital and symbols of material progress” (qtd. in Lindsay, 58). Thus, any
thesis on the marginalization of men, ultimately falls within the ambit
of men’s own fight for the ascendancy of economic and reproductive
12 S. BASU
resources, rather than any emasculating agenda or economic coup pulled

by the women of any particular ethno-cultural community.
Patricia Mohammed in her 1998 paper hints at this complexity.
According to Mohammed, the reassignment of the occupational roles of
women as possible bread-earners, as well as the determining authority of
their own capacity have challenged the conventional notions of Caribbean
masculinity while stretching the concepts of femininity.7 This may be
the result of the male fear of emasculation from the “God given and
natural role of men.” Miller’s thesis on the marginalization of black men
pertains to this emasculation thesis which extends the dominant colo-
nial baggage of male victimization. Miller works within a paradigm of
male dominance, assuming the validity and societal justification of this
ideology, thereby consigning the culpability to the women. While Miller
observes with reasonable accuracy that Jamaican women have understand-
ably adapted to educational opportunities and achieved greater mobility
than men, he fails to question the idea of “manhood” objectively and the
way in which the construct may remain static, oblivious of the changing
social requirements. L. Lewis similarly argues in “Caribbean Masculinity
at the Fin de Siecle” (1996) that factors like race, class, age, and sexual
orientation affects the degrees in which Caribbean men are marginalized.
He also acknowledges that any such loss of agency might be the product
of evolving socioeconomic and political determinations and not women’s
abject attempt to subordinate men.
The legacy of prejudice conditioning the access to educational
resources for men and women in the past continues. While positivists
may quote examination results to establish that women are now outper-
forming men on several higher academic ambit, the statistics need to be
treated with due caution:
Firstly, female students are still clustered in such subject areas which
have traditionally been considered suitable for girls. Thus, women excel
in humanities but men are still more visible and often have higher chances
of doing better in science or technology-based subjects.
Secondly, although it can be argued that women often consider educa-
tion as a tool for social mobility and utilize it more avidly than men, the
occupational statistics glaringly remain in favor of men once they leave
school. Furthermore, in most professions, men monopolize higher and
better-paid jobs, with a marked sexual upper-hand at job places. Thus,
although there is a significant number of women teachers, there are
precious few women in positions of academic leadership. This disparity
becomes increasingly visible further up the academic scale, with negligible

numbers of deans and masters at the University level.
Odette Parry raises two questions at this juncture: why is it that when
Caribbean males appear to have many advantages in the occupational
structure in spite of under-performing in school? Alternatively, despite the
possibility of discriminatory professional practices, how do the Caribbean
female students continue to perform well at school? Parry argues:
[I]n the Caribbean, male educational failure and female educational success
have been understood in zero-sum terms. That is, followers of the ‘male
marginalization’ thesis in education (developed by Miller 1986, 1989.
1991) feel that they represent two sides of the same equation. Built
into this equation is a causal function, so that males are thought to be
doing badly precisely because females are doing well. When the problem is
conceived in this way it appears that there is a definitive amount of ‘success’
to be had, and if females have it males cannot. (88)
We discern that similar to every marginalization concept, this emas-

culation theory of the Caribbean male is also governed by biological
determinism—the notion that the behavior of sexes is governed by
biological limitations. Some marginal theorists refute the justification of
this determinism. Miller argues in his Men at Risk asserting that the
biological determination of sex, is in contrast to the social determination
of gender. Patriarchy, according to him, has:
[A]scribed roles and stereotypes for succeeding generations of men and

women…conditioned mentalities and mystiques surrounding maleness and
femaleness…delayed women’s efforts to come out from under its yoke.
(Miller, qtd. in Lindsay, 73)
However, this supposedly anti-essentialist notion of masculinity and femi-

ninity is allegedly grounded on biological determinism. Keisha Lindsay
argues in “Is the Caribbean Male an Endangered Species?” that Miller’s
work on the marginalization argument rests decisively on the presumption
that women’s biological capacity as life-givers is the source of their subor-
dination, despite being the tool of their eventual empowerment. Lindsay
also insists that Miller himself insists on his notion of womanhood certain
deterministic characteristics as patience, passivity, and nonaggression:
14 S. BASU
Biology…pre-disposed that femininity…be defined as and females social-

ized in behaviors and habits like caring, nurturing, gentleness, kindness,
tenderness, cooperation, accommodation of differences, longsuffering,
patience, acquiescence and passivity. (Miller, qtd in Lindsay, 73)
Secondly, Lindsay argues that the marginalization thesis assumes that

every individual is either liberated or subjugated depending on their
innate biological capabilities. This also assumes a male individual’s rela-
tively greater biological capacity as a life-taker, thereby underlining
certain traits like aggression and confrontation as innately masculine. It
is these deterministic features in the alienated male that emphasizes their
own marginalization and domination despite the edge that patriarchy
supposedly invests them with.
It is generally argued by critics like Patricia Mohammed, that the
Caribbean construct of masculine and feminine is riddled with an uncrit-
ical acceptance of biologically determined differences between the two
gender forms. While the Caribbean male has emerged as the patriarch,
the provider and the one who controls female sexuality, the Caribbean
women have emerged as adaptable creatures deploying devious means
to manipulate the social construct. Thus, any deviation from this norm
creates the narrow idea of victimized men and demonized women. This
idea can be posited in the marginalization thesis with utmost ease. The
marginalization thesis subscribes to this mythologized Caribbean male,
the protector, the provider, and the determiner. This approach also
assumes that masculinity has a sexual responsibility, which once taken
away entails subsequent victimization of the male. Thus, while it is
suggested that Caribbean women have docilely bowed down to their male
sponsorship, it is also hinted at that these supposedly meek women have
deviously conspired to do one against their male folk consistently.
Keisha Lindsay maintains that both the empirical evidence and theoret-
ical tenets applied by the marginalized theorists rest on a limited notion
about power:
Implicit in the marginalization thesis is the presumption that power is

wholly “concrete” or quantifiable—that power or the lack thereof can be
measured according to aggregate statistics, be they literacy data or income
levels. The thesis presumes power to be a fixed entity emanating from a
series of specific points—specifically from the “institutions” of the family,
the educational system, the workplace and labour force.
This dual notion of power as both fixed and quantitative is, however,
flawed. To argue that women can overpower men simply on the basis
of increased income or occupational status is to incorrectly presume that
income or occupational dominance form the sole basis of men’s control
over women. Instead, there is a vast aspect of patriarchal power which is
neither fixed nor quantifiable; an aspect which remains intact whether or
not women increase their rates of literacy, university education or middle
class status relative to their male counterparts. (75–76)
This argument reminds us of Foucault’s The History of Sexuality that

women’s advances in certain areas do not disrupt the overall patriarchal
power which is not limited in being a structure or an institution.
Thus the highly controversial perception of the marginalization thesis
concerning the authentic condition around gender relations in education,
kinship, and the professional space suggests a flaw in objectively analyzing
the full dimension of the available data:
[T]he failure of the thesis to explore the ways in which the head of
household status is often economically disempowering (author’s italics) to
women; the continued occupational and educational sex-role stereotyping
of girl’s and women in teaching, nursing, home economics and other
arenas traditionally deemed as “women’s work”; and the continued low
occupational status of women vis-a-vis men in management, agriculture
and other major economic sectors. (Lindsay, 78)
The marginalization thesis thus marks a (wilful?) misrepresentation of the

empirical gender reality in the socioeconomic fields presuming that social
research should ideally be conducted through the recording and analyses
of verifiable, objective facts, free of any biologically determined construct.
The feminist epistemological and operational venture in the Caribbean
thus can be divided into three objectives:
First, as the downsides in the marginalization thesis hints at, there is
an immediate need for objective interrogation of the authentic statistical
frameworks which shape much of the established gender discourse in the
region till now.
Second, following such an unbiased interrogation and possible objec-
tive criticism, there should be the provision of viable, alternative episte-
mologies, and procedures. To be precise, efforts at Caribbean feminist
epistemology must strive to be territory centered i.e. purely based on
Caribbean subjectivity.
16 S. BASU
Thirdly, the theories and knowledge systems that uncritically retrench

ideas and models contributing little to either gynocritic scholarship or the
authentic resources of women in the space should be carefully weeded
away.
Early Caribbean history has largely been left out from serious gender-
based research. The sources have been inadequate at best, and extremely
ethno-biased in the few scanty that have been found. For instance,
there is a dearth of sources on how gender operated in the pre-contact
Amerindian societies or even in the post-contact indigenous communi-
ties which survived past the sixteenth century except in such records like
Columbus’ log between 1492 and 1493 and that of the French priests,
with keen observations deeply entrenched in the colonial agenda. They
are both ethnocentric (when the Caribbean women are seen in the eyes
of European males) and also androcentric (the women are being subjected
to the “male gaze”). We also lack knowledge of the gender relation-
ships of any time before slave society had matured. Colonization and
conquest were principally masculine enterprises, where the perpetrators
were principally male carrying on policies decided upon in a deeply patri-
archal society. As a result, the early frontier phase was often characterized
by a predominantly male population (both white and black). Though
there have been readings such as those made by Richard Dunn, Richard
Sheridan, and the Bridenbaughs, not much has been done to under-
stand women or gender within the contexts, with rare exceptions like
Trevor Brunard’s sociological ideation on colonial Jamaica which focuses
on gender dynamics therein. Even the work on the slavery era8 becomes
somewhat substantial and research worthy in the studies after 1770 with
the increasing availability of raw data in the laterday slaving commu-
nities. However, those studies have also prioritized their focus against
looking into the condition of Caucasian women or freed Amerindian or
Afro-Caribbean women in slave society.9
Even in the post-emancipation nineteenth and twentieth centuries10
records, there are glaring gaps in any thesis regarding the conditions of
women. Little has been recorded on the situation of freed women or
in the gradual emergence of the middle-class, educated women of any
ethnicity within the Caribbean communities. Though scholarship on the
migration experiences of smaller ethnic or religious immigrant communi-
ties (Portuguese, Chinese, Jewish, and Syrian/Lebanese) are increasing,
there is a need for more research on the Jahaji experiences of the inden-
tured Indo-Caribbean women; on beliefs and practices as well as on
issues like occupational and kinship choices and social mobility.11 In the
absence of such extant records, little has been understood or interro-
gated on women’s involvement in performances and representationary
practices like Jonkonnu and carnival; as well on the growing impact of
the respectable, middle-class gender roles and their impact across ethnic-
ities and classes. The existing historiography of the space has focused on
Jamaica, Barbados, and Trinbago; with smatterings of records on Guyana,
Belize, and Tahiti, albeit from a targeted women’s history or gender
history perspective.
It should be remembered that the Caribbean itself is a heteroge-
neous society,12 thus an effort to homogenize the research findings will
not only be contrived but also will be essentially flawed. Moreover, the
topic and principle of the research should be historically located and as
was mentioned earlier culture-specific. Moreover, certain accommoda-
tions should be exercised in understanding the process of research and
any affiliation that may affect the choices of inclusion. Nevertheless, this
gradual buildup of empirical knowledge, insights, analysis and perspectives
on gender roles, power plays, and the situation of the women promises to
evolve and contribute to reconstruct the social history of the Caribbean
in a nuanced and possibly more holistic manner while engendering the
Caribbean reality. Hence we must be careful not to fall victim to the ever-
persistent trope of using various “analytical categories and even strategies
which codify their (the western normative model’s my words ) relationship
to the Other in implicitly hierarchical terms” (Talpade Mohanty, 197).
Cultural theorists have explicated on the fluidity and instability of
“culture” as we know it. Ranging from Stuart Hall’s unfixed identity,
James Clifford’s traveling theory and the impact of imbibing spatial and
cultural elements, Doreen Massey’s identity and place, and Homi Bhab-
ha’s mimicry, hybridity, ambivalence, and the idea of the “third space,”
contemporary understanding of culture and identity tend to stress on its
being in the constant process of production and change. Hall claims that
rubrics of identity are “never singular but multiple, constructed across
different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and
positions” (Hall, 4). James Clifford’s discourse rethink cultures as sites
for dwelling and traveling, where a constant exposure to multiple cultures
affect the evolution of human identity and practices. While Clifford has
been criticized for his understanding that culture is monolithic within
a particular ethno-spatial arena, and that the “tainting” can only occur
18 S. BASU
when in contact with other homogenous cultures. As a result, the iden-

tity of the traveler is constructed “in between” the traveling and the
dwelling. Thus, even if there is no active physical displacement, culture
and identity may be identified as inherently unstable, changeable, move-
able entities. While arguing the impossibility of having an essentialized
monolithic culture, Bhabha offers the notion of “the third space” to
accommodate the idea of cultural hybridity. Considering culture in rela-
tion to the “colonial,” he holds on “the third space” as a strategy for
creating an ambivalent space of cultural discourse beyond the reach of
cultural hegemony and transcending its historical boundaries. We need
to understand that any postcolonial study, at its core, has often been an
introspection into the ethicality involved in the process of political and
social changes. Thus, while looking at the idea of Hybridity as a result of
the colonial process, there are also moments of discomfort that cannot go
unnoticed. In his interview with Jonathan Rutherford, Bhabha identifies
the key issues with Hybridity pertaining to the position of the host culture
in relation to the “Other” culture: firstly, the initial “norm given by
the host society or dominant culture,” and secondly, to multiculturalism
based on racism (Bhabha 1990, 208). Thus, while there is always encour-
agement in acknowledging the cultural diversity of a postcolonial world,
there is also an obvious effort of containing the cultural difference. And
curiously, there is also an inherent degree of racism that gets glossed over
in the process of celebrating cultural diversity. As a result, the reality(ies)
of a multicultural society can be one that hosts a political space with
contrasting identities, various interest groups, antagonistic and incom-
mensurable to each other. Consequently, there is an effort to look for a
“productive space of the construction of culture as difference, in spite of
alterity or otherness,” to prove the plurality, uniqueness and incommen-
surability of individual cultures (Bhabha 1990, 209). As Bhabha focuses
on the emergence of the “third space,” he also dismisses any importance
in tracing the first and the second cultural lineages, which have eventually
birthed the third; but on the endless possibility of this liminal third space
facilitating other cultural positions. This position differs from the earlier
preoccupation with the histories of culture, as this site of ambivalence
supposedly gets rid of all histories which created it, and “sets up new
structures of authority, new political initiatives, which are inadequately
understood through received wisdom” (211), supposedly neutralizing
cultural binarism and the politics of polarity.
Bhabha initiates the argument with the notion of “cultural transla-

tion” as a strategy of negotiations between two cultures to create the
required “third space.” This translation is an adaptation of a perceived
“original,” which can be “simulated, copied, transferred, transformed,
made into a simulacrum” (Bhabha, 210). Translation connects the orig-
inal and the multiple simulacrum or copies that are derived from it and
creates a mesh of activity where translation becomes repetitive and contin-
uous. It is not only that the “original” is translated, but the subsequent
simulacrum can also be translated to such an extent that the “original”
becomes a myth, something which can neither be validated nor authen-
ticated any more; and any attempt to do so may turn essentialist and
potentially dangerous. Cultural translation “opens up the possibility of
articulating different, even incommensurable cultural practices and prior-
ities” (Bhabha 1990, 210–211). This is how the “third space” emerges
within a continuous flux, and the ensuing negotiation can engender a
constant subversion, de-normalization, and abjection, thereby creating,
what Bhabha insists is a whole range of “new.” Identity or rather “iden-
tification (in the psychoanalytic sense) (211)” emerge as a whole unique
site through the process of hybridization. It should be noted that the
pertinence of the “whole unique site” is under scrutiny in the present
argument. However, we should recognize that Bhabha accommodates the
possibility of minority discourses and impossibility of any cultural contain-
ment as “cultural and political identity is constructed through a process
of othering” (Bhabha 1990, 219) and the inclusion of the continuous
other destabilizes the possibility of cultural barriers. A dialogue ensues;
thereby obliterating misrepresented essentialization. Bhabha acknowl-
edges another essentialization identification replacing the earlier one,
where the class identification is used to normalize and homogenize the
alterities. This is the loss of the self, which creates a political openness for
a non-assimilationist identity formation. While talking of the “Rushdie
affair,” Bhabha insists that the prejudice against The Satanic Verses was
meant to put Shiite Iran under the lens of intolerance and bigotry, and
yet it was more of a conflict between Rushdie and the “British Brad-
ford” rather than any “other” sect. In a way, therefore, postcolonial
perspectives, in Bhabha’s opinion, seriously question the pertinence of
the “liberal” sense of any community.
In this regard, Bhabha asserts particular responsibilities for intellec-
tuals. According to him, the “committed intellectuals” should fulfill dual
20 S. BASU
responsibilities—they need to “intervene in particular struggles, in partic-

ular situations of political negotiation”; as well as a certain degree of
concomitance to the actual political relevance of theoretical propositions
(Bhabha 1990, 219). In other words, scholars should accommodate posi-
tions of dialectics while examining cultural politics, instead of determining
a fixed jumping ground, with singular privileged agenda of representation.
Bhabha further states that the colonial individual is neither “the colonialist
Self nor the colonized Other but the disturbing distance in-between that
constitutes the figure of colonial otherness” (Bhabha 1994, 45), hence
proposing any contained effort of representation reductive. This concept
of the in-betweenness and fluid borders (something that Amitav Ghosh
implies as “Shadow Lines” in the title of his eponymous novel) destabi-
lizes the idea of a set spatiality. Conversely, any ethnic, cultural, or national
identity loses its complacent fixedness and becomes an organic entity
“waiting to be created and constructed” (1990: 220), losing, in Bhabha’s
opinion, every form of vanguardism, having diluted the polarity of the
ruler and the ruled. Consequently, all hierarchies dissolve into an ambiva-
lence and political subjectivity turns into “a multi-dimensional, conflictual
form of identification” (1990: 221). However, Bhabha’s assertion of this
egalitarian ambivalence does not credit the lived experiences of the multi-
cultural individual; neither does it take into account the gender reality in
a multicultural society. While he sets store on the exiled or the traveling
individual, he commits the fallacy that he intends to correct—of holding
the individual metonymic of the entire category of travelers or exiles.
Cultural critic Andrew Gurr, on the other hand, posits that the idea
of “home” (conversely the “self”) can only be perceived and represented
while in an exile or at least imagining oneself removed from the idea of
“home” or the “self.” The identity can be symptomatic of what s/he
obtains through his/her writing. Writing is, therefore, another form of
negotiation that the shifting individual can obtain with the changing
cultures. This “in-between” allows greater imaginative and representa-
tional flexibility. This threshold also provides the migrant wider options
to negotiate his/her identity from the endless possibilities offered. In
theory, this negotiation is a free choice neither determined by one’s
location nor is it a resolute homogenous unit. The exile belonging to
the twenty-first century inevitably negotiates between spaces as between
cultures; the negotiation continues until the migrant/exile carves out a
niche for oneself within the multiple cultural spaces. Hence writing, (or
performative articulation of any sort) can be a narration of one’s cultural
identity. One communicates while one travels through various cultures,

and with communication and exchanges, comes the “cultural translation”
that Bhabha imagined. On the other hand, if culture is a thing acquired
sociologically, then it is also profoundly susceptible to be mimed, copied,
or appropriated through continuous human interaction, thus effectively
disrupting the claim of a pure unadulterated community, which runs the
risk of contamination once exposed. If we maintain this argument from
both Bhabha and Gurr, then it is not inconceivable to assume that hybrid
culture may also be susceptible to the vagaries of outside influence. As R.
Radhakrishnan puts it:
And hybridity is heady stuff: transgressive in more than one direction, de-
territorializing, and immanently sui generis in its mode of signification.
With hybridity, anything is possible for the simple reason that hybridity is
about making meaning without the repression of a pre-existing normativity
or teleology: in the exhilarating a-nomie between “having been deterri-
torialized” and “awaiting to be reterritorialized” there is all manner of
unprecedented “becoming.” (Radhakrishnan, lines 3–6)
Hybridity thus offers a range of cultural mechanisms to create and deter-

mine affiliations and alignments that cannot be consigned into any closed
space—they are open-ended, organic, and unfixed. Hence, any effort
of determining “cultural difference” fails as the comparing units never
become stationary enough to facilitate any real, objective parameters of
matching. Hybridity turns into “a place of resistance where the colonized
and the colonizer negotiate a new space inaccessible to either discrete
group. It becomes a site of semiotic interaction and an enabling instance”
(Loomba, 122). Hence any negotiation comes with a certainty of power-
play with some cultural determinant acting as a dominant. “Signs, symbols
or marks of power re-emerge, after being emptied and re-assigned within
the hybrid world” (Loomba, 122). “It is not that the voice of authority is
at a loss for words. It is, rather, that the colonial discourse has reached that
point, when, faced with the hybridity of its objects, the presence of power
is revealed as something other than what its rules of recognition assert”
(Bhabha 1994, 35). Bhabha also discusses the possibility of ambivalence
and conflict as givens within the hybrid space. The “third space” is not,
and will never be a safely content automated space, but will always come
with a price of irresolution. Hence, most of the iconic literary works of
colonial encounters do not signify the unilateral power relation between
22 S. BASU
the colonizer and the colonized, but represent something unique that can
be experienced by those who come across such power dynamics. And in
this state of instability of ambivalent power relations, it is not unprece-
dented for culture-specific hybridity to form a different type of power
relation—gendered.
In this strain, one of the predominant arguments of this study is
that in these economic and sociopolitical upheaval cultural practices like
dramatics, carnival and calypso changed from the typical rejoicing of inde-
pendence in 1962 with articulations against colonial exploitation and
inequality to a more problematic take on the changing tides of society.
The colonial–colonized polarity gave way to an acknowledgment of the
multiplicity of economic and hence societal nuances. With the changing
social condition, the interconnection among the three performance forms
increased and so did their inter-dependence. Hence, the obvious cultural
change was visible in all three art forms. Hence, while the conventional
drama lost its all-inclusive social commentary, especially about the hybrid
experience of women, the topsy-turvy potpourri world of the carnival
became increasingly boisterous at the expense of the objectified female
body and the calypso focused on the angst of the men, who are leaving
for the distant shores of the Gulf and whose life is being encroached by
the now masculine and opportunist women. To put it succinctly, as a reac-
tion to the Oil Boom, the performance traditions of the Caribbean islands
interconnectedly overlooked the independently acquired hybrid experi-
ence of the women for that of the men, providing them with an edge to
lead their women folk in the thoroughly masculinized hybrid experience.
Notes
1. The “oil boom” refers to the sudden increase in the price of oil around
1973, resulting in a centralized control over the international price of
crude oil by Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).
This reconfigured the economy of the region into a predominantly
oil-based revenues, thereby increasing the exposure, cosmopolity, wages
and the state of living of an average individual. However, there were
subsequent inflation in domestic market, and the homegrown industrial
products lost their edge in internal export due to higher cost. The then
Prime Minister Eric Williams created a new industrial Trinidad, redrafting
the national imagination into a modern urban space. The quick and to
a certain extent unplanned industrialization including oil refining and the
production of iron, steel, liquid ammonia, methanol, urea, and fertilizer,

was expensive and resulted in enormous public debt.
2. There were moments of unease and discord as the shift from agriculture to
industry was considered partial towards the Afro-Caribbean electorates by
many rural industry stake-holders, especially Indo-Caribbean farmers, by
PNM. This unease had apparently influenced many novels by Caribbean
authors of Indian descent like Sam Selvon and Naipaul.
3. We should take note that matriarchy and matrifocality are in no way inter-
changeable terms. While both the ideas invest increased agency and power
for the female members of a given social and familial unit, the affect of
the said agency on extra familial spaces at the broader parameters of social,
political, economical, and ideological arena of the social order and its
intended impact on the given field which differentiates the two concepts.
According to anthropologist R.T. Smith, matrifocality involves a cultural
and functional centrality of women within their kinship circles. It is:
…a social process in which there was a salience of women – in their

role as mothers – within the domestic domain, correlated directly
with the class position of the population involved and focusing on
the articulation of kinship and class. (Smith, qtd in Rowley, 23–24)
On the other hand, the influence of matriarchy transcends the concept

of family and kinship, and conditions an overall centrality that extends to
and more often creates the ideological and institutional ordering of social
organization. Matriarchy may exist beyond matrofocality and vice versa.
However, their independence is a rare occurrence and may be influenced
by the economic structure of the given social unit. Thus, in a broad state-
ment, matrifocality ensures the centrality of the mother while matriarchy
ensures centrality of a woman.
4. We can mention Harry Belafonte’s “Jamaica Farewell” with its obvious
implication that a “man” is leaving Jamaica leaving his “little girl” behind
in Kingston Town:
Down the way where the nights are gay

And the sun shines daily on the mountain top
I took a trip on a sailing ship
And when I reached Jamaica I made a stop
CHORUS:
But I’m sad to say, I’m on my way
Won’t be back for many a day
My heart is down, my head is turning around
I had to leave a little girl in Kingston town. (Lyrics by Erving
Burgess)
24 S. BASU
5. While critics like Carl Wint in his “Where Have All the Men Gone” (1989)
and Errol Miller in his Men at Risk (1991) champion this cause, several
other critics like Pedro Noguera, Patricia Mohammed and Odette Parry
defy this thesis with actual groundwork.
6. What does this mean for black women? – and aren’t they in crisis too?
7.
…patriarchs, men of the dominant group, in defending their

group’s interest from challenges from the men of other groups in
society, relax their patriarchal closure over education, employment
and status symbols. Thus allowing their women and the women in
the challenging groups most of the opportunities that would have
gone to men of the challenging group. (Miller, 166)
…shifted from being male dominated to being female dominated
as a result of the intention of the ruling class to release black men
from service type occupations to make them available for agricul-
tural and industrial labour, and to stifle the possible emergence
of militant black educated men who could possibly overthrow the
power structure…The women who would benefit and the colleges
for female teachers that would grow as a result… [did] nothing to
cause the outcome. They were the only innocents in the matter.
(Miller, 68–73, qtd in Lindsay, 59)
Women’s liberation, thus, is indebted to and is the ultimate consequence

of the male power struggle.
8. One of the first instances of such a study was made by Lucille Mathurin
Mair with her unpublished 1974 doctoral dissertation from the University
of West Indies, her popular book Rebel Women (1975) which may have
emerged from her thesis and her 1986 Goveia Lecture titled “Women
Field Workers in Jamaica during Slavery”. Mathurin Mair is probably the
first third world female scholar to bring the idea of gender within the
slavery scholarship, contrasting between the experience of the female slave
and that of the male slave, questioning the economic as well as reproduc-
tive expectations of the woman. Her thesis is considered one of the first
full-scale studies in women’s history on a Caribbean country.
9. Hilary Beckles and Mary Butler have important publishing in this regard.
Boa and Kerr have also contributed to the study of post-slavery Jamaican
women in 1993.
10. Records from this era show a gradual decline of the normalized sexual
abuses and with caning, gang labour and other corporeal oppressions of
female slaves, even during sickness, pregnancy and childbirth that was
flagrant in the early slave era. There is a possibility that the increase
of accommodations for wives and young mothers were nothing more
than an exploitation of their reproductive powers. But still, the changes

conditioned women’s health and fertility, with the rates of successful
childbearing increased after 1838, despite the high mortality rate for
infants and the elderly. While, the plantation owners facilitated more
slaves for themselves, there was also increased stability within the slave
families, and even allowed possibilities of independent survival. However,
in the post emancipation Caribbean, there was a concentrated effort
of imposing European gender norms on the ex-slaves in a neocolonial
civilizing mission. The male members were consigned to familial head-
ship and were relegated the responsibility of being breadwinners and
mothers/wives were divested of having any economic autonomy.
11. Useful work has been done in this field, though predominantly based
on Jamaica. Linnette Vassell, Joan French, and Joy Lumsden have based
their research on Jamaica while Linda Peake, Neville Duncan, Honor Ford
Smith, and Roberta Kilkenny have focused on Guyana. The arguments of
their undertaking largely connected the economic and legal rights of the
middle class women, connecting them with the black nationalist groups
and other progressive political organizations, resembling the emergent
socialist feminist scholarship of the 70s US. There were consistent engage-
ments with feminist leaders like Audrey Jeffers (Trinidad) and Amy Bailey
and Una Marson (Jamaica), in a way similar to the popularization of Gloria
Steinem, Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm, and others. These
works though highly valuable as demographic studies, do not afford a
holistic picture.
12. This represents individuals who differ in terms of ethnic identities, gender,
age, and able-bodiedness.
Works Cited
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.
———. “The Third Space.” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed.
Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990, 207–221.
Hall, Stuart. “Who Needs ‘Identity’?” Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart
Hall and Paul du Gay. London: Sage, 1996, 1–17. Print.
Lindsay, Keisha. “Is the Caribbean Male an Endangered Species?” Rpt. in
Mohammed, 2002, 56–82. Print.
Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Massey, Doreen. Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity, 1994.
Mohammed, Patricia. Gendered Realities: Essays in Caribbean Feminist Thought.
Barbados: University of the West Indies Press, Centre for Gender and
Development Studies, 2002. Print.
26 S. BASU
——–. Rethinking Caribbean ‘Difference’: Feminist Review 59. New York:

Routledge, 1998. Print.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and
Colonial Discourse.” Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed.
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres. Bloomington
and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991, 51–80. Print.
Momsen, Janet. “The Double Paradox.” Rpt. in Mohammed, 2002, 44–55.
Print.
Mulchasingh, Vernon C. “The Oil Industry in the Economy of Trinidad.”
Caribbean Studies 11(1) (April 1971), 73–100. https://www.jstor.org/sta
ble/25612364. Web.
Niblett, Michael. “Black Was Never More Beautiful.” Journal of West Indian
Literature 24(2) Special Issue: Caribbean Ecocriticism (November 2016), 27–
45. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/90003603. Web.
Parry, Odette. “Gendered Methodologies and Feminist Awakenings.” Rpt. in
Mohammed, 2002, 83–106. Print.
Puri, Shalini. The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Postnationalism and
Cultural Hybridity. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Print.
Radhakrishnan, Rajagopalan, “Adjucating Hybridity, Coordinating Between-
ness.” Jouvert 5. 2000. https://legacy.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v5i1/radha.
htm.
Rowley, Michelle. “Reconceptualizing Voice: The Role of Matrifocality in
Shaping Theories and Caribbean Voices.” Rpt. in Mohammed, 2002, 22–43.
Print.
CHAPTER 2
Race, Performance, Identity,

and the Possibility of an Incomplete
Articulation of Hybridity
The discourse of identity suggests that the culture of a people is at root—

and the question of roots is very much at issue—a question of its essence, a
question of the fundamentals of a culture. Histories come and go, people
come and go, situations change. It provides a kind of ground for our
identities, something to which we can return, something solid, something
fixed, something stabilized, around which we can organize our identities
and our sense of belongingness. And there is a sense that modern nations
and people cannot survive for long and succeed without the capacity to
touch ground, as it were, in the name of their cultural identities. (Hall
1993, 282)
I look for a passionate research directed to the secret hope of discovering

beyond the misery of today, beyond self-contempt, resignation, and abju-
ration, some beautiful and splendid area whose existence rehabilitates us
both in regard to ourselves and others. (Fanon, 32)
2.1 Construction of Racial

and Ethnic Identity in the Caribbean
Critics of hybridity and multiculturalism often admit that hierarchy cannot
be avoided in identity formation, it being too usual for being an excep-
tion. This chapter is driven to explore the dynamics of racial identity
formation and how cultural hybridity rises as a way out but gets enmeshed
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 27

Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022
S. Basu, Gendered Identity and the Lost Female,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4967-8_2
28 S. BASU
in its own web. It further argues that hybrid experience in the postcolo-
nial realm becomes hierarchialized as it attains a distinctly gendered power
order.
It is not difficult to place the racial and ethnic issues of the Caribbean
islands in the postcolonial arena. In the postcolonial literary ambit, ethnic
groups maintain their individuality through unique practices, beliefs,
and representations based on their historical and cultural lineage. The
dislocated and the dispossessed, contrary to the expectation of tragic
homelessness, find a new cultural location. In the Caribbean the narrative
of dislocation changes depth, as the degree of cultural, and racial mixing
is a lot more layered. Andrew Gurr argues: “The deracination, exile and
alienation in varying forms are the conditions of existence for the modern
writer the world over. The basic response to such conditions is a search for
identity, the quest for a home, through self-discovery or self-realization”
(14). Other than the heritage of emancipated slaves and other racial immi-
grants, the jahaji experience of the first indentured settlers of Caribbean
might also be considered as sites of cultural and linguistic creolization in
Caribbean. This situates the concept of identity as spatially conditioned,
rather than the reductive idea of identity formation with the effect of colo-
nialism and modernization. Doreen Massey’s equation of identity and the
lived space, ties the conventional idea of one habitat to one’s ontologic
sense of “self,” however, “the concept of place is not static but unstable”
and “places are processes” (Massey, 155), thereby sustaining the fluidity
of identity formation.
Places do not have single, unique “identities”; they are full of internal
conflicts […] [such as] conflict over what its past has been (the nature
of its “heritage”), conflict over what should be its present development,
conflict over what could be its future. None of this denies place nor the
importance of the uniqueness of place. The specificity of place is continually
reproduced. (Massey, 155)
In the Anglophone Caribbean, we have to keep in mind that the sense

of local is also conditioned by the sense of the “home” that was left
behind. With the myth of a distant motherland haunting the postcolonial
consciousness, it becomes difficult for the settler to lose his/her “indi-
genity” to become “Caribbean” or “West Indian”, essentially. Apart from
immediate familial identity, a social individual also establishes a comfort
kinship zone around oneself: clan, tribe, caste, class, nation, sexuality, as
2 RACE, PERFORMANCE, IDENTITY, AND THE POSSIBILITY … 29
well as racial and ethnic definitions. Massey traces race and ethnicity as
lower level determinants of identity formation, and yet acknowledges the
historiographic connection of individual to their myth of origin based on
them. Race and ethnicity hence are considered the last link of an indi-
vidual to their origin, which they have migrated from or have lost touch
with the other inhabitants with whom they shared it. With successive
migrations and splitting up, especially in the Caribbean, differences in
phenotypical and genotypical traits, as well as distinctions in behavioral,
philosophical, aesthetic, and symbolic patterns emerged and subsequently
evolved.
Mervyn C. Alleyne, portrays the construction and representation of
racial and ethnic identity as distinctive features of classification, where an
individual can find others of their own category and exclude those who
do not belong:
Race, then, is the socialized perception of phenotypical characteristics.

These phenotypical characteristics constitute only one of the features recog-
nized and used for human classification. Behaviour and customs (language,
clothing, foods, religion) constitute another set of features and, together
with race, provide the basis for ethnicity.
It is in this perception of similarities and differences that is the basis on

which individuals and groups identify themselves as belonging to the same
race and ethnic group, and on the other hand, identify others as belonging
to a different race and ethnic group.1 (Alleyne, 2)
Alleyne attempts to reemphasize that the categories of race and ethnicity,

which any society actively espouses, depend on socioeconomic, political,
and ideological factors; which the given social unit has indoctrinated over
the years. Thus, while “negro” or “black” in America can be determined
on the basis of “one drop” of African blood, other ethnic categories like
the “Native American” may not similarly and analogously be established
(3). In the Caribbean, the categories are established differently and are
arranged in much more complex systems.
Ethnicity and race are socially constructed, contextual representations that

play themselves out at specific historical periods. Racial meanings are
contested and transformed as people counterpose their own constructions
of identity, community and history. Thus the vocabulary and meaning
30 S. BASU
constantly change: one drop of black blood makes you black in the United
States but white in Latin America. (Alleyne, 3)
What can be gleaned from Alleyne’s study is that contemporary scholar-

ship elaborates on the difficulty or impossibility or inappropriateness of
establishing clear biological race distinction and of hierarchizing it. What
we understand as the social construction of race rests upon the appropria-
tion of a few chosen phenotypical and genotypical features. Skin color and
hair textures which are considered to be socio-racial markers are empha-
sized time and again in both anthropological and postcolonial theory, the
skin color being the more salient of the two.2 Edward Shills believes that
color demarcation to be:
[P]rimordial quality, one of the earliest sensibilities of man as a vehicle

of self-identification. The awareness of differences in skin colour heightens
awareness of other differences. It does not just by symbolizing those differ-
ences, but by serving as a focus of self-identification as a member of a
species with a distinctive biological origin and separateness. (Shills, qtd. in
Alleyne, 5)
The Caribbean societies in general decides on skin color from more than
a range of shades—they are often the result of racial mixing; and is
perceived as ranging from extreme black to extreme white, depending
upon the perceived degree of miscegenation. Similarly the scale of hair
texture ranges from straight to woolly. One feature tends to mitigate the
absence of the other. But while hair texture may complement or supple-
ment skin color in the racial classification of the individual, it may also
lead to other racial possibility, often overruling the initial categorization
based on complexion.
Miscegenation and its absence have created three consequences in the
Caribbean racial classification:
● Firstly, race, in general, remains a definite discernment and is mostly

labeled stringently to categories, albeit the barriers of such categories
may be somewhat blurred.
● Secondly, offsprings of interracial unions may come to form and
define other categories, which may be ethnically designated and
recognized, and yet may not be classified as an accepted race.
● Thirdly, the racial categorization of an individual may be conditioned

by their access to economic resources and on the ideological bent of
the given community. In reality, economy and ideology are dominant
indices in any class, caste, ethnic, and religious striation. The popular
perception of “money can whiten,” may be applied to ideology that
can both increase or decrease an individual’s racial mobility. The
Black Power militants in Trinidad in the 1970s made an effort to
reassign newer definitions and ideological dimensions to the idea
of “black” by assimilating the Indo-Caribbean populace within the
racial category.
Apart from physical features, there exist other less obvious and tangible
features which have come to be associated with races. These features—
beliefs, behaviors, customs, and artifacts—i.e. the cultural aspects of iden-
tity formation should be distinguished from ethnicity. Though ethnicity
is conditioned by cultural and racial coordinates, culture includes the less
salient and more tangible distinctive features like religion, beliefs, rituals,
language, customs, and practices, the permutations of them contributing
to the formation of ethnic identity. Moreover, belonging to an ethnicity
also creates a post-recognition willingness to act in the interest of the
group. This mental inclination of the alliance is crucial to ethnic identity,
as it affects the willingness of belonging to the ethnic group in which
one is identified as a member of and also when one, in turn, is acknowl-
edged as a member of the said group. Whereas culture is communicated
and ascribed, ethnicity is engendered through an endorsement of same-
ness and a disposition to contribute to the common cause. Thus, the
same culture may accommodate multiple ethnic groups within its ambit,
or at least the groups may coexist with minor cultural differences. In
the Caribbean, there are instances of many different ethnicities being
conflated under one “race” like French Creoles and Anglo Saxons in
Trinidad.
The racial and ethnic categorization has evolved significantly in the
Caribbean. The socio-psychological structures of the older societies in
Europe and Africa were transposed in the newer societies like the
Caribbean. The first important sociohistorical fact is that instances of
migration and settlement often caused the diverse ethnic groups made
to coexist in relatively small physical spaces and are therefore unable
to avoid each other. In addition to the indigenous people, there were
Europeans of different denominations, Africans of different ethnicities,
32 S. BASU
diversified Indians, Chinese Arabs, Jews, and the Japanese. Often these
groups had no similarities in language, appearance, or practices, and yet
had multiple points of contact where they were obligated to communicate
with each other. With the emergence of newer categories of racially and
culturally mixed individuals, there was a necessity to find new forms of
terminological representations. Thus, in the peculiar social and economic
circumstances, new dimensions of race and ethnicity evolved. Effects of
slavery and racism lead to the extreme low esteem in the “black” popu-
lace and conscious of the depreciatory stereotypes and generalizations
attached to their identity. The Maroon communities of individuals who
escaped slavery into remote islands were exceptions and yet were never
a large enough category to claim the status of different ethnic identities.
Caribbean people especially the Creoles aspired to form a new identity for
themselves acknowledging both their poly-ethnic and racial lineage. This
was, in a manner, an eloquent method of gaining political independence,
economic survival and mental liberation.
The first two categories of creolized or mixed ancestry arose from the
crossing of white males with indigenous Carib/Arawak females giving
rise to the mestizo, and with African females forming the sub-ethnicity of
mulatto. As a derivation from mulo meaning mule, the term “mulatto” is
an essentially racist and derogatory term that inherits both the pejorative
connotations of its root and the suffix—ato which denotes derogation.
The naming of the first category (mestizo) represents a time of definite
wonder and curiosity at newer races arriving and settling in the indige-
nous soil. This had some constructive strains as on the stranger tides the
colonizers rediscovered themselves in contrast with the foreigner. The
distrust had not yet emerged and racial miscegenation was not entirely
frowned upon. However with the emergence of the mulatto, the choice
of naming reflected the shift in the popular perception regarding the
“other,” the curiosity and wonder was replaced by contempt and deri-
sion. The mulatto was considered an aberration of nature, a genetic dead
end that will never multiply due to its unnaturalness. However, the initial
disparagement displayed in the naming of the category evolved with the
stabilization of the slave community as it was realized that the mulatto
group may be used to mediate between the planters and the often recal-
citrant black slaves. And although relations between the mulatto and the
white planter were never cordial, there was a conscious allowance of a
middle position as a strategy of maintaining order among the slaving class.
The mulatto woman was preferred as sexual partner than a darker slave
girl, and the “fairer” males were often acknowledged by their fathers and
there have been instances of them being educated abroad in order to be
admitted in the fringes of the polite white society.
The mulatto eventually gained considerable social mobility and estab-
lished certain significance among the Caribbean elites, often being
included within the white planter society. Among the French, the asso-
ciation with mule was lost and the name lost its pejorative ending, -ato,
and became mulatre (denoting color terms). The addition of this new
ending, -atre caused the amelioration of the mulatto in French through
its incorporation into the color representation of race and ethnicity. It
further validated the European obsession with naming people according
to the color of their skin. It is rather inconclusive whether the British
cultures have stopped associating such derogatory epithets with mulatto,
but among the Anglophone Caribbean cultures the term still bears certain
baggage. The Jamaican version of the word malate, claims to be entirely
devoid of any semantic association with the word mule.
While discussing the idea of such cultural and racial miscegenation,
a few associations automatically surface. While the threshold, twilight
or liminal conditions resemble the underlying connotations of a racial
hybrid, the interstitial condition has a whole range of theoretical postu-
lations behind it. Homi K. Bhabha addresses the “liminal” position that
any cultural identity may manifest across differences of race, class, gender,
and cultural traditions:
It is in the emergence of the interstices—the overlap and displacement of

domains of difference--that the intersubjective and collective experiences
of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated. How
are subjects formed ‘in-between’, or in excess of, the sum of the ‘parts’ of
difference (usually intoned as race/class/gender etc.)? How do strategies of
representation or empowerment come to be formulated in the competing
claims of communities where, despite shared histories of deprivation and
discrimination, the exchange of values, meanings and priorities may not
always be collaborative and dialogical, but may be profoundly antagonistic,
conflictual and even incommensurable? (Bhabha, 2)
Bhabha argues that no cultural identity can ever subscribe to a set of

predetermined and scripted cultural traits with unaffected historical insu-
lation. This differing historical determination makes the interconnected
syncretic relationships—even ones like colonizer and colonized—comple-
mentary of each other. This gives rise to a cultural interface that constantly
34 S. BASU
exchanges cultural performances forming mutable recognition of differ-

ences. This mutability, and fluidity of space, turns the space of interface
and difference into a “hybrid” site, where cultural meaning is produced:
Terms of cultural engagement, whether antagonistic or affiliative, are

produced performatively. The representation of difference must not be
hastily read as the reflection of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in
the fixed tablet of tradition. The social articulation of difference, from
the minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks
to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical
transformation. (Bhabha, 2)
Thus, these boundaries of syncretic space become the site of production,

rather than passive observance, and initiates the process of ambivalence
and reaching out. Bhabha calls this a bridge, which not only changes the
ones who are passing but also absorbs certain changes itself: “[a]lways and
ever differently the bridge escorts the lingering and hastening ways of men
to and fro, so that they may get to other banks…. The bridge gathers
as a passage that crosses (Bhabha, 5).” Bhabha’s liminality accommo-
dates spaces between cultural units, as well as temporal and spatial sites,
politics and principles; and theory and application. Ashcroft considers
Bhabha’s understanding of hybridity as the most effective form of subver-
sion, as it puts previously contrary points of culture in the juxtaposition of
each other (9). Robert Young supports Ashcroft in asserting that Bhabha
has successfully formulated an idea that challenges and resists against a
dominant cultural power (23), upending Bakhtin’s idea of intentional
hybridity into something more organic and compelling, thus employing
a “double-voiced talk.” R. Radhakrishnan, however, protests against this
homogenous take on hybridity, as he finds hybridity in the postcolonial
space essentially different from the experience of hybridity in a space
which has not formally experienced colonialism: “whereas metropolitan
hybridity is ensconced comfortably in the heartland of both national and
transnational citizenship, postcolonial hybridity is in a frustrating search
for constituency and a legitimate political identity” (753), as this world is
more prone to “the winds of change” (765). Thus, the Caribbean experi-
ence of hybridity is not an alternative but the default situation of identity
formation, and stands out in four distinct ways of essential Caribbeanness.
● It is the identity and experience which can efficiently encompass the

historical disjunctions in the archipelago.
● Can create a double-consciousness that matches the expectations of
postcolonialism as well as the Caribbean ethos.
● Can be tangibly externalized through the phenomenon of Creole;
and
● Expresses an easy comfort with ambivalence and non-centeredness
that is essentially Caribbean.
Néstor García Canclini writes of South American colonialism, by putting

cultural modernism as a political strategy of connecting traditions with
gradual modernization:
We remember formerly the syncretic forms created by Spanish and

Portuguese matrices mixing with indigenous representation. In the projects
of independence and national development we saw the struggle to make
cultural modernism compatible with economic semi-modernization, and
both compatible with the persistent traditions. (241–242)
This degree of compatibility, similar to Eric Williams’ national plan of

“Caribbeanness,” also accommodates migration across national borders,
expatriation, voluntary crossing like tourism and traveling; as well as
effects of globalization. Similar miscegenation is also represented through
Creole, which emerges as a creative space, essentially Caribbean, and oscil-
lating between multiple epistemes of colonial engagement, none complete
in itself, but together forming a collage of an authentic hybrid Caribbean
self. While Benitez Rojo celebrates “a certain kind of way” (23), a
particular form of fluidity and ambivalence that matches the Caribbean
essence, this constant emergence of Creole and pidgin, portrays “hyper-
creolization”, which might insist on an aggressive stance against the
pressure of other standardized languages, insisting on an enforced nation-
alist agenda behind the identity of creole (Jackson, 136–137). This
overlapping creates a sense of commonality; yet hinting at a distinction,
where the speaker may move with ease across various cultures (Bhab-
ha’s idea of a bridge comes to mind), recreates the understanding of
syncretism and kinship among disparities. However, the frustration of a
racially creolized individual (we should refer to the dougla and mulatto
communities) who often are denied any typical belongingness. Poems like
Walcott’s “Randy White Grandsire,” echoes a rage and disgust against
36 S. BASU
those unacknowledged colonizer ancestors, who have spurned their mixed

racial descendants:
…Where was my randy white grandsire from?

He left here a century ago
To found his ‘farm’
And, like a thousand others,
Drunkenly seed their archipelago.
Through dirty glass
His landscape fills my face.
Black with despair
He set his flesh on fire,
Blackening, a tree of flame.
That’s hell enough for here.
His blood burns through me as this engine races,
My skin sears like a hairshirt with his name…
Like you grandfather, I cannot change places,
I am half-home. (Walcott, qtd. in Lynn, 54)
Sex, race, ethnicity, and class conditions the idea of Caribbean culture.
Thus, there are disparities in the experiences of hybrid men and women.
Thinkers like Raphael Confiant, therefore, point out how ideas like sexu-
ality and racial appeal define Indo-Caribbean men and women differently
from Indo-African populace. Thus, we can perceive certain moral policing
and judgments that function differently across ethnic and gender coordi-
nates. While expressions of hybridity in men may represent dissension and
virility, the same might be condemned in a woman for promiscuity and
license. Such limitations are deterrents for what society may dub “unnat-
ural unions,” warning that the resulting offspring may be subjected to
stringent racial and gender roles and determinations, with boundaries that
no masculinist and reactionary culture allows to transcend.
The race and performance relationship within the dialogic space of
Anglophone Caribbean is a heritage of both colonial history and its
aftermath, as well as the more contemporary realities that form the
postcolonial societies. With the performance cultures in the Caribbean
space, the history of the imagination, placement, and representation of
performing bodies and sexuality, become a central point of concern.
The visible sexuality of a “black” female body becomes the image with
which a Caribbean island culture is normally associated. However, its
negotiations with the alternate cultures within the space, and the situ-
ated cultural representations of Indo-Caribbean women, offer a larger
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his patron, by whom he was employed to manage an affair requiring
great delicacy as well as firmness in handling it. This was nothing
less than to make his way through the heart of the French armies,
and to open a communication first with Murat, and afterwards with
the Austrian Government. It was while so employed that Mr Graham
became acquainted with Sir Charles, then Captain Napier, of the
Euryalus frigate, of whom he conceived a very high opinion, and with
whom, in due course of time, he quarrelled violently.
Mr Graham, after accompanying Lord William Bentinck through
his campaign in Italy, returned to England, and began, early in 1815,
to feel his way towards a seat in the House of Commons. It was a
season, as a few of our readers may possibly recollect, of great
suffering among the people, and anxiety to the Government. The
renewal of the war with France added upwards of one hundred
millions to the national debt; and peace, when it was purchased by
the battle of Waterloo, seemed to bring only poverty in its train. A
spirit of general disaffection pervaded the masses, and recourse was
had to stringent measures in order to preserve the public peace.
Drawn away by old associations, Mr Graham joined the ranks of the
ultra-Liberals. Lord Archibald Hamilton was his kinsman, and Lord
Folkstone, Sir Francis Burdett, and Lord Althorpe, won his political
affections. His father, on the other hand, continued to profess the
Tory principles in which he had grown old; so that, but for the
sympathy of Lady Catherine, the young man might have found
himself ill at ease as an inmate of Netherby Hall. Accordingly, he
spent but little of his time there in the interval between his return
from abroad and the general election of 1818; when, being assured of
the support of Lord Milton, and obtaining through his mother letters
of recommendation to Mr Wilberforce, he entered the lists as a
candidate for Hull, and fought a hard battle to a successful issue.
We confess not to hold the name of William Wilberforce quite in
the same degree of veneration in which it is held by his sons. We
believe that there was no slight sprinkling of what is vulgarly called
humbug in the good man’s character; and we find some
corroboration of this suspicion in the fact that, though well aware of
Mr Graham’s ultra-Liberal opinions, he nevertheless, because of the
affection with which he regarded Lady Catherine, recommended her
son to the constituency of Hull. A like charge may, we think, be
brought against Dean Milner, subject, of course, to extenuating
circumstances. Dean Milner conscientiously believed that the
admission of Roman Catholics to political power would be
tantamount to the establishment of idolatry in Great Britain: yet he,
too, because Lady Catherine sat at his feet, gave a testimonial to her
son, whom he knew to be an advocate of Catholic emancipation. By
these means, and through the active agency of two Roman Catholic
gentlemen and one clergyman of the Church of England, Mr Graham
conducted his canvass with such spirit, that on the day of nomination
an immense majority of hands was held up in his favour; and at the
end of the second day’s polling he was thirty-three ahead of the
gentleman whom he had determined to oust, and whom he
succeeded in ousting. Those, however, were times when polling went
on for fifteen consecutive days, during which electors and their
friends lived at free quarters, candidates paying the piper. When,
therefore, the returning-officer declared that Mr Graham had beaten
Mr Stamford by thirty-eight votes, and when Mr Stamford’s
committee thereupon demanded a scrutiny, Mr Graham’s heart sank
within him. His father had with difficulty been prevailed upon to
sanction his entering into the contest at all. The funds at his disposal
were quite exhausted, and here was the battle to be fought over
again. But who, having committed himself to such a struggle, ever
willingly withdrew from it? Mr Graham did not; and at the end of a
month he was pronounced member for Hull, with a debt of £6000
hanging like a millstone upon his back.
The lesson thus taught him at the outset of his career Mr Graham
never afterwards forgot. He was fortunate enough to raise the money
at interest, without calling upon his father for a shilling; but he
registered a vow to rush no more blindfold into scrapes of the kind;
and he kept it, in spite of many a strong inducement in after-times to
the contrary.
Mr Graham took his seat on the third Opposition bench, behind
his relative Lord Archibald Hamilton. Near him sat Mr E. Ellice (the
Bear), Sir Robert Wilson, and Mr F. E. Kennedy; below him, Sir
Francis Burdett, Mr Hume, and Lord Althorpe. It was a goodly
association, and it produced its legitimate results. The war of parties
soon began; and in March 1819, scarcely a month after he had taken
his seat, the young member delivered his maiden speech. It proved a
signal failure. Abounding in platitudes, and spoken with the air and
in the tone of an exquisite, it scarcely commanded the attention of
the House for a moment, and was brought to a close amid that buzz
of general conversation which, more surely than any violent outcry of
dissent, marks the disinclination of the Commons of England to be
instructed. Mr Graham felt that his shot had missed, yet he by no
means lost heart. He believed that the causes of the failure might be
equally shared between himself and the House, and he determined to
try again and again till he should compel the attention which was
now denied him. Meanwhile, he sought comfort under the
disappointment in a connection which proved to be the source, to
him, of the purest happiness through life. On the 8th of July 1819 he
married Fanny Callander, one of the loveliest women whom England,
fertile in beauty, had ever produced. She was the daughter of Colonel
Sir James Callander, afterwards Campbell of Arkinglas, and the aunt,
as we need hardly stop to observe, of the still beautiful and highly-
gifted Mrs Norton.
Mr Graham’s next effort was made during that eventful autumn
session when Parliament met in consequence of the Peterloo affair,
and the Government demanded powers beyond those of the
constitution, to deal with the dangers which threatened the country.
One of the bills which Ministers proposed, with a view to stop the
organised agitation which Radical delegates kept up, prohibited all
persons, not resident in a town, or being freeholders, from taking any
part in the proceedings of a town meeting. Here was an opportunity
which the ambitious member for Hull could not possibly allow to
escape. He rose to demand whether the member for a borough, being
neither the inhabitant of such borough nor a freeman, would come
within the meaning of the Act; and when, to his great indignation,
nobody seemed inclined to reply, he had the imprudence to argue the
case, and to state it as peculiarly his own. Just at that moment a
sound of suppressed laughter was heard in the House, whereupon
the member for Hull lost his head, and, after rambling on for a few
minutes without a single cheer to sustain him, sat down, retaining no
recollection either of what he had said, or of what he meant to say.
“There’s an end of Graham,” exclaimed Mr Henry Lascelles,
jeeringly; “we shall hear no more of him.” But Mr Lascelles was
mistaken.
Nothing daunted by this discomfiture, the baffled senator stood up
again when the bill went into committee. This time he had carefully
prepared his speech, and the House listened to it, without, however,
evincing any signs that it approved. He was still on the losing side in
politics; and though his friends saw that there was good stuff in him,
even they scarcely ventured to hope that he would ever prove more
than a useful second-rate orator, and a good man of business
whenever matters of detail came to be considered.
The death of George III. in February 1820 warned the House of
Commons that its days were numbered. The Government was
desirous of precipitating the dissolution; and the Opposition took, in
consequence, an early opportunity to hamper them, as far as might
be, by a small reform bill. Lord John Russell proposed that the writs
for Grampound, Penrhyn, Barnstaple, and Camelford, should be
suspended, in order to afford the new Parliament an opportunity of
inquiring into the corruption with which these boroughs were
charged. But Lord John’s motion, which Mr Graham supported,
though successful in the Lower House, was thrown out in the Upper,
and the members dispersed, each to look after his own interest as he
best might.
It would have been idle in Mr Graham to offer himself again to the
constituency of Hull. He had done nothing in Parliament to secure a
re-election, except at the cost of a second contest, and that he could
not afford. The interest of the debt incurred by the first election
pressed heavily upon his small income, and he at once made up his
mind to look for a seat elsewhere. Now the Lowther influence,
powerful as it had heretofore been, was beginning to give way in the
north of England. Both the county of Cumberland and the city of
Carlisle were growing restive, and the Whigs declared their intention
of fighting for both seats in the city, and for one at least in the
county. It was proposed to Mr Graham that he should stand in the
Liberal interest for Carlisle; while Mr Curwen, up to that time the
city member, contested the county against Sir John Lowther.
Anxious as he was to return to the House of Commons, Mr Graham
had the good taste to decline this proposal. He could not fight under
a Whig banner so close to Netherby without greatly distressing his
father; and, vaulting as his ambition was, it did not blind him to the
impropriety of such a course. He contented himself, therefore, with
throwing the weight of his influence into Mr Curwen’s scale as
candidate for the county. Mr Curwen succeeded, so did Mr John Cam
Hobhouse in Westminster, advocating household suffrage, triennal
Parliaments, and counting among the busiest of his canvassers the
late member for Hull. Mr Graham’s activity on that occasion fixed
upon him the attention of certain gentlemen connected by property
with the little borough of St Ives. They took him up, he canvassed the
constituency, and on the day of election was brought in at the head of
the poll. And well and zealously he redeemed the pledges which he
had given to his Liberal supporters. He voted with Mr Hume against
a proposed increase to the civil-list of George IV., and for inquiry
into the expenses of the Regency during the five preceding years. He
took part with Mr Brougham in his attack on the droits of the Crown
and of the Admiralty, and joined Lord John Russell in demanding
that the report on the civil-list should be deferred till the estimates
for the year had been fully examined. Every proposal, in short, which
had for its object the weakening of the influence of the Crown and
the overthrow of existing usages, received his cordial support. He
was, with Mr Curwen and Mr Brougham, a decided enemy to the
Corn Laws as they then existed. He went into the gallery with Lord
John Russell for the disfranchisement of Grampound, and the
transfer of its members to Leeds. In a like spirit, he stood by Lord
Archibald Hamilton when denouncing the Scottish system of
election, and requiring that the number of Barons of the Exchequer
should be reduced. Finally, in the disputes which arose about Queen
Caroline, he ranged himself under her Majesty’s banner. This was
pretty well within the brief interval of less than a year, as indicating
the course which he had determined to follow. But a check came. The
electors of St Ives were not at all satisfied with their new member.
They presented a petition early in 1821 against Mr Graham’s return,
and Mr Graham, rather than incur the certain expense and hazard of
a scrutiny, resigned his seat.
Mortified as he was at finding himself thus excluded from public
life, Mr Graham possessed too good a digestion to let the
circumstance prey upon his spirits. His home was then, as it
continued to be to the last, the chief scene of his happiness; and the
birth of his first-born son, on the 7th of April 1820, shed additional
light over the domestic circle. It suited neither his means nor his
tastes to reside in London as an idler; he therefore retired into
Cumberland, and, settling down at Crofthead, the unpretending
house to which he had carried his beautiful bride, he threw himself
with all his energies into country pursuits. It was high time that he
should. His father, an easy-going and generous man, had never
looked after his affairs as became him. He put himself entirely into
the hands of an agent, from whom he exacted no accounts, and who
did with the rents of the large estate of Netherby pretty much as he
pleased. The consequence was that farms and farm-buildings went to
ruin. Payments on account were all that the landlord received, and
tenants got into arrear so far that recovery was impossible. With
some difficulty Mr Graham prevailed upon his father to transfer the
management of the property to him, and the work of practical reform
began. But the extent of the difficulties with which he had to grapple
may be guessed at, when we say that encumbrances to the amount of
not less than £120,000 lay like a dead weight upon Netherby.
Mr Graham had accomplished a good deal. Money was raised on
more favourable terms; roads were made, marshes drained, farm-
buildings rendered habitable, and a better system of tillage
introduced, when, in 1824, his father died, and he succeeded to the
title and to the estate. An additional burden was of course laid upon
the latter in the shape of dower to Lady Catherine, but for the sisters
of the new proprietor scarcely any provision had been made. Sir
James, like a good brother as he was, supplied the deficiency out of
his own funds. But this done, there remained so little on which to
reckon, more especially with his views of extensive improvement,
that he thought seriously of selling Netherby, and of embarking, with
whatever might remain to him after paying off the mortgages, in
trade. He even went so far as to open a negotiation with a London
banking-house which happened at that moment to desire an
extension of its business, and waited only the judgment of Mr James
Evan Bailey of Bristol, to whom, through a friend, he referred the
question. “Tell him,” said that experienced banker, “to hold fast by
Netherby, and keep clear of banking.” By Netherby Sir James
accordingly held fast, and within twelve months the names of Messrs
Pole, Thornton, Down, & Co. appeared in the ‘Gazette.’
It had been Sir James’s dream that, as a banker or as a thriving
merchant, he would find readier access to the political career on
which he desired to enter, than as the owner of a large and
encumbered estate. The fate of Messrs Pole and Thornton awoke him
from that dream, and he bent all his energies to diminish, if he could
not entirely remove, the debt upon Netherby. His own habits were
prudent and economical. He chose for his associates practical
agriculturists, studied every work that came out on the subject of
agriculture, and put in practice such suggestions as appeared to be
wise. He read, likewise, with a view to prepare himself at some future
time for public life, and read to excellent purpose. The consequence
was, that every year saw the burden diminish which at the outset
seemed to be intolerable; and that, in 1826, his circumstances, if not
easy, were at all events much less harassing than at one moment he
had expected them ever to be.
It was at this time that he first came before the public as an author.
His pamphlet on corn and currency made a great sensation, taking
men of all parties by surprise. Its argument went far beyond the age
in which it appeared. Upon the Bank Restriction Act of 1797 he laid
the blame of all the evils under which the country then laboured, and
censured Mr Peel for returning too hastily to cash payments in 1819.
The sliding-scale, as a protection to corn-growers, he entirely
condemned, and reasoned in favour of free trade, with a small but
fixed duty on foreign corn as some compensation for the peculiar
burdens which the land was called upon to bear. We who read the
pamphlet now, remembering all that the country has gone through,
and looking to the present state both of its manufacturing and
agricultural interests, cannot sufficiently admire the audacity of the
country gentleman who, in 1826, could thus express himself. But his
audacity told. Though all the leaders of party, from Lord Liverpool to
Cobbet, denounced and censured, there were multitudes in the ranks
who approved the Cumberland baronet’s reasoning, and no great
while elapsed ere they gave tangible proof of their sympathy with his
views.
At the dissolution of Parliament in 1826, Mr James, who for some
time had represented Carlisle, retired. A requisition was immediately
sent in to Sir James Graham, who replied to it favourably, and came
forward as the Liberal candidate. We do not use the stronger term
Radical, because, to do him justice, Sir James never voted for
universal suffrage and annual Parliaments; but of everything on the
sinking-scale short of these two points he was then the advocate. He
declared himself in favour of the immediate abolition of slavery, the
total removal of religious disabilities, retrenchment in the public
expenditure, and the reduction within moderate limits of the import-
duty on corn. The struggle was fierce both in Carlisle and elsewhere,
for the Catholic Question was approaching a crisis; and Sir James,
supported by all the operatives of the city, came in at the head of the
poll. His first vote in the House was against the Government, on a
question of an increased grant out of the Consolidated Fund to the
Duke and Duchess of Clarence; his next, for an inquiry into the
abuses in the Court of Chancery. On both occasions he went into the
lobby, one of a small minority. But already prospects began to open
for him, on which he had no reason to count in returning to public
life. Lord Liverpool was struck down by paralysis in 1827, and that
scramble for a successor at the Treasury began, of which, by the way,
Mr Torrens gives a very inaccurate account. Following implicitly the
story told by Mr Stapleton, he endeavours to show that Canning was
no intriguer; that George IV. hated and would have set Canning
aside, had he seen his way to any other arrangement; and that the
Conyngham influence had nothing in the world to say in deciding the
King’s policy. We know better; and we know likewise that not the
Tories only, but the most consistent and stanchest of the Whigs
never trusted Canning. Sir James Graham, on the other hand, ranged
himself among the Canningites, and soon became the friend and
favourite pupil of Huskisson. He sat on the ministerial side of the
Speaker’s chair while Canning led the House, and he retained his
place during the administration which succeeded on Canning’s
demise. But Lord Goderich’s reign was short; and on the assumption
of office by the Duke of Wellington, Sir James withdrew with his
Whig allies to the Opposition benches. His opposition, however,
appears to have been a good deal modified by the esteem in which he
held Mr Huskisson. The Corn Bill which that gentleman introduced,
still being a minister, Sir James Graham supported, though it was
framed on a principle at variance with that which he had advocated
in his pamphlet; and many years elapsed ere he could bring himself
to contemplate without alarm the disturbance of the compromise
into which, as he believed, contending parties had entered by its
adoption.
In 1827 a vacancy occurred in the representation of Cumberland,
and Sir James was easily persuaded to resign his seat for Carlisle and
to set up for the county. His return was not opposed, and he entered
the House after a brief absence as a county member. Though still
ineffective in debate, the House began to consider him a man of
promise. He was an excellent member of committees, assiduous in
his attendance, and remarkably skilful in sifting evidence. He spoke
likewise with effect in moving for an inquiry into the fitness of
limiting the circulation of Scotch notes to Scotland itself; and his
speech, though overladen, as most of his speeches were, with
quotations, was referred to by almost all who followed him, whether
advocating or opposing the view which he took of the matter. But his
great start was taken, when the Duke, by passing his Catholic Relief
Bill, gave the first decided shock to the Tory party. Sir James of
course approved the measure, of which, as well as of the repeal of the
Test and Corporation Acts, he had always been the consistent
supporter. And he did more. He took an opportunity of commending
Sir Robert Peel, in his absence, for the sacrifice to duty which he had
made of his seat for the University of Oxford, and paved the way
thereby for the close intimacy which in due time arose between him
and that great though not always straightforward or very consistent
statesman.
Whatever the Duke’s conduct and views at that critical moment
may have been, those of his subordinates strike us now as not only
impolitic, but dishonest. Sir George Murray went out of his way to
assure the Whigs that he intended to manage the affairs of the
colonies on the principles which they advocated. Sir Henry Hardinge
became a frequent visitor at Spenser House, and professed opinions
there which led Lord Althorpe to reckon upon him as a willing
member of a new coalition. Meanwhile three members of Brookes’s,
Lords Rosselyn and Jersey and Sir James Scarlett, held office under
a Tory chief, and Earl Grey was approached with a view to
conciliation by creating his son-in-law, Mr Lambton, Earl of
Durham. All this gave sure evidence of weakness on the part of the
Government, and encouraged the discontented among its old
supporters to aim at its overthrow. On the other hand, Sir James
Graham, as if looking rather to a fusion than to the break-up of
parties, declared that he saw little difference, except on the question
of the currency, between the opinions entertained by the Opposition
on the one side, and the friends of the Administration on the other.
And, as if to test the House, he moved, on going into Committee of
Supply, that since Peel’s bill of 1819 was accepted as a final
settlement of the currency question, the salaries of all public servants
should be cut down by 20 per cent. Though listened to attentively, he
received small support, either from his own friends or the friends of
the Government; but he added, by the vigour of his appeal, to the
reputation which he had already acquired, and was by common
consent assigned a place with Lord Althorpe, Lord John Russell, and
Mr Brougham, as one of the leaders of the Opposition in the House
of Commons.
Early in May 1830 the Parliamentary campaign opened in earnest,
by a notice of motion by Sir James Graham for a return of all the
pensions, salaries, and emoluments then receivable by members of
the Privy Council. His speech was, in its own way, a telling one; and
the motion was met by a proposal from the Chancellor of the
Exchequer to supply the honourable member with a comprehensive
enumeration of all civil and military offices and salaries under the
Crown. Sir James either felt or affected great indignation, and, in
rejecting Mr Goulbourne’s counter-proposal, made use of the
expression, “That he was not disposed to stoop to ignoble game while
flights of voracious birds of prey were floating in the upper regions of
the air.” This was one of the clap-traps in which Sir James on all
convenient occasions indulged, and it had its effect. Not fewer than
147 members in a House of 382 voted with him—a remarkable sign
of the times, a sure proof that men’s passions had overclouded their
reason on many matters, and that Government by party, as it had
once existed, was for a season at least at an end.
Encouraged by the plaudits which were heaped upon him, Sir
James, after remaining quiet for a few weeks, moved to reduce the
grant for special diplomatic missions from £28,000 to £18,000 a
year. He was again opposed with all the strength which the
Government could muster, and again failed. But failure on this
occasion was accepted on both sides as a triumph. In a House of 217
members, the motion was rejected by a majority of 19 only. It was a
blow to the Ministers scarcely less severe than that which they
received the same evening, when Sir James Mackintosh carried his
clause in the Forgery Bill against them—abolishing the punishment
of death in all cases except where wills were concerned.
The death of George IV., on the 20th of June 1830, was soon
followed by the dissolution of Parliament. Sir James went back to his
constituents with a reputation largely enhanced; and while his
canvass was at its height, tidings of the revolution in Paris arrived.
They set the whole country in a blaze, and two Liberal members
immediately started for Cumberland. A fierce contest ensued, of the
temper of which some idea may be formed when we transcribe one of
the toasts which was proposed and accepted amid a tempest of
applause at a public dinner given to Sir James Graham at
Whitehaven—“May the heads of Don Miguel, King Ferdinand, and
Charles Capet be severed from their bodies and roll in the dust, and
the sooner the better.” It would be unfair to the memory of Sir James
Graham if we omitted to add that he wholly disapproved of this
sentiment, and that, while applauding the revolution, he expressed
himself anxious that the French people should use their victory with
moderation.
We have now arrived at an era into the history of which it would be
out of place, while sketching Sir James Graham’s career, to enter
much at length. The elections of 1830 had gone against the
Government, and the country seemed to have become a prey to
anarchy. There were incendiary fires in many places; and when
Parliament met in November to provide a remedy, the worst spirit
manifested itself in both Houses. The King’s visit to the Lord Mayor
of London was postponed; and the Duke, with extraordinary
rashness, gave utterance to a statement which his enemies insisted
on accepting as a manifesto against all reform. A coalition between
the Whigs and the ultra-Tories to expel him from power ensued, and
Ministers, being defeated on a question of the civil-list, resigned
their places. In bringing all this to pass Sir James had taken an active
part, and he received his reward in the appointment of First Lord of
the Admiralty, with a seat in Earl Grey’s Cabinet. He was placed at
the Admiralty, however, rather as representing ultra opinions than
from any admiration of his talents and industry; for Earl Grey,
desiring above all things to throw the authority of Government into
the hands of aristocrats, was too prudent to overlook the policy,
situated as he then was, of having every great party in the State
represented in his Cabinet. Hence the Duke of Richmond, Mr Wynn,
Lord Palmerston, Lord Goderich, and Mr Charles Grant, were invited
to take their seats beside Lord Lansdowne, Lord Althorpe, and Lord
Carlisle; and Lord Durham, Sir James Graham, and Lord Melbourne
readily joined them. Among all these there was not one who
displayed so large an amount of administrative ability as Sir James
Graham, or who with so much frankness acknowledged, when the
proper time came, that the improvements effected by him in the
department were little more than the execution of plans which his
predecessor had already arranged and determined upon.
Earl Grey had taken office pledged to three things,—
Retrenchment, Non-intervention in Foreign Affairs, and
Parliamentary Reform. Into all these Sir James Graham eagerly
threw himself. Returned again without opposition for Cumberland,
he took up his residence at the Admiralty, and worked like a slave to
keep ahead of the enormous amount of business which devolved
upon him. For now his real worth was discovered. What might be
wanting in brilliancy he endeavoured to make up by labour; and he
held his own, not without a hard fight for it, in the House of
Commons. Lord Althorpe, the acknowledged leader of the
Ministerial party, was slow and confused. He derived the greatest
benefit from the subtle and ambitious promptings of Graham, and
often sought for them. Whether the proposal in the first Whig budget
to impose a tax on the transfer of stock came from this source does
not appear; but the measure, in spite of the eloquence with which Sir
James Graham supported it, met with no success, and was
withdrawn amid the jeers of the House.
This was a bad beginning, and his speech in defence of the army
estimates proved equally unfortunate. The pledge of non-
intervention had been thrown over by the Government in the case of
Belgium, and an increase to the army was asked for. In advocating
this increase, Sir James allowed himself considerable latitude of
speech in regard to the condition of Ireland, and O’Gorman Mahon,
conceiving that he, among others, had been attacked, called upon the
First Lord to retract, or else to give him personal satisfaction. Sir
James requested Lord Althorpe to act for him on that occasion, and
the quarrel was amicably settled.
The improvements introduced into the constitution of the
Admiralty were chiefly these: Sir James abolished the Victualling and
Navy Boards as separate establishments; he required the accounts of
the office to be kept by double entry; he proposed to throw open the
great national asylum at Greenwich to seamen of the mercantile
marine; and, failing to accomplish that, he relieved the mercantile
marine from the special tax which it had heretofore borne. Nor was
he all the while exempt from a full share of the burden of
administration in other respects. Earl Grey never lost sight of the
pledge which he had given to reform the representative system
throughout the United Kingdom, and a committee of four was
appointed to investigate the whole subject, and to report upon it to
the Cabinet. Lord Durham, Lord John Russell, Lord Duncannon, and
Sir James Graham composed that committee, of which no member
worked more steadily and with greater zeal than Sir James.
It is not our purpose to tell over again the thrice-told tale of the
bloodless revolution of 1831–32. In preparing the scheme which the
Government was to bring forward, Sir James Graham appears to
have been less extravagant than some of his colleagues. He desired to
interfere as little as possible with existing rights in counties, except
by adding copyholders and leaseholders to the ancient freeholders.
In boroughs he was an advocate for occupancy as a condition to
freedom, and was willing that the limit of the pecuniary
qualifications should be wide. He objected to the ballot, and to
anything like an attempt to establish perfect uniformity of franchise
anywhere. Yet such was his infirmity of purpose that he yielded his
own opinions to those of men of stronger will, and affixed his
signature to a report which recommended the ballot and other
arrangements of which he disapproved. It was this weakness, indeed
—this apparent inability to arrive at settled convictions and to stand
by them—which constituted the great flaw in Sir James Graham’s
character as a public man. His biographer, we observe, commends
him for the specialty, and endeavours to make what was mere
irresolution stand in the light of judicial impartiality. “Half his life,”
says Mr Torrens, “was spent in comparing and pondering opposite
results, and determining judicially in the silence and solitude of his
study on which side the balance lay. ‘Upon the whole’ again and
again occurs throughout his private correspondence and public
judgments, for judgments they frequently were—a phrase which a
statesman of a constitutional country may well employ as eminently
expressive of the true candour and humility of wisdom.” Doubtless
this is true; but if we find the statesman afterwards going apart from
his own conclusions, and falling in with proposals against which he
had “on the whole” decided, what can we say of him except that his
humility degenerates into weakness, and that, whatever qualities he
may possess, firmness of purpose is certainly not one of them?
It is a remarkable fact that not even now could Sir James Graham
command the attention of the House. His great attention to business,
his value on a committee, and his administrative abilities, were very
generally acknowledged, but as a speaker he made little or no
impression. Even his advocacy of what may be called his own
measure was felt to be feeble—a strange medley of confused
discussion and turgid enunciations. But the bill had other sources of
strength to depend upon than the logic of its Parliamentary
supporters. Political unions and conspiracies out of doors did the
work, and the King and the House of Lords were forced to accept
their own humiliation. First came the dissolution on the 23d of April
1831, a step into which William IV. was coerced by the overbearing
insolence of Earl Grey and Lord Chancellor Brougham. Then
followed elections wherein brute force bore down all opposition, and
by-and-by such an assembly at Westminster as struck terror into the
hearts of the Ministers who had brought it together. On the top of
that wave Sir James Graham was again borne into Parliament—a
colleague being given to him of opinions far more advanced than his
own. So it befell in the borough of Carlisle, so also in the
neighbouring county of Westmoreland. It is quite certain that Sir
James Graham did not contemplate the crisis, which he had helped
to bring on, without alarm. “We have ventured,” he says, speaking of
himself and his colleagues, “to drive nearer the brink than any other
statesman ever did before; but we did so because aware that if we let
go the reins the horses would be maddened into plunging headlong
into the abyss, where extrication would be impossible.”
We have alluded elsewhere to Sir James Graham’s reconstruction
of the departments in the Admiralty. It is creditable to him that he
disclaimed all the merit of originality in such reconstruction. He
discovered, on acceding to office, that plans of practical reform were
already settled, and he had the good sense to accept and act upon
them as his own. He found a willing adviser likewise in Lord Melville,
who kept back nothing from him when consulted. Having completed
this job, he set himself next to devise some means of getting rid of
the necessity of impressment, and was again fortunate enough to
have brought to him an important letter, addressed by Lord Nelson
to Earl St Vincent. The letter in question suggested that there ought
to be a registration of seamen, among whom, at the sudden outbreak
of war, a ballot should take place, with permission, as in the militia,
to find substitutes. But, anxious as he was to accomplish this object,
he shrank as a Minister of the Crown from openly striking a blow at
the prerogative. When, therefore, Mr Buckingham moved, “That the
forcible impressment of seamen for His Majesty’s navy was unjust,
cruel, inefficient, and unnecessary,” Sir James Graham resisted the
motion. He fought, however, less for the evil itself than for the
manner of applying a remedy, and obtained leave of the House to
bring in a bill which has many admirable points in it, but which he
was not destined to guide through its various stages till it became
law.
The years 1833 and 1834 were seasons of sore trial to the Reform
Government. They had evoked a power at home which they found
themselves ill able to control. They had entered into treaties and
engagements abroad, the necessity of acting up to which involved
them in heavy expenses. But most of all were they hampered and
annoyed by the operations of the Irish party, which, after helping
them to carry their great measure, asked for its reward. The Irish
Established Church must be sacrificed; and the better to insure a
speedy attainment of that object, an agitation was got up for the
repeal of the Union. Now, Earl Grey was not a man to endure
contradiction calmly; he introduced a stern Coercion Bill into the
House of Lords, which his colleagues fought inch by inch in the
House of Commons. In order to conciliate their Radical supporters,
they proposed at the same time to reduce the number of Irish
bishops, and to substitute for church-rate in Ireland moneys to be
raised by taxes imposed on all sees and benefices. Finally, after
providing, as was assumed, a better method of managing episcopal
and chapter lands, a clause in their bill declared “That it should be
lawful to appropriate any portion thence accruing to purposes of
secular utility, without regard to the religious opinions of persons to
be benefited.” This famous clause (the 147th) was warmly debated,
and in the end withdrawn. But neither section of the Legislature
seemed to be satisfied. Indeed, in the Cabinet itself diversity of
opinion was held in regard to that matter, and no great while elapsed
ere diversity of opinion led to separation.
The first overt proof of schism in the Cabinet was presented by the
opposite sides which Sir James Graham and his colleagues took on
Mr O’Connell’s motion of censure upon the Irish judge, Sir William
Smith. Sir James stoutly resisted it. Mr Stanley, Lord Althorpe, and
Lord John Russell voted for it. On a division, Sir James went out
with a minority of 74, and next morning tendered his resignation. He
had proved himself, however, too valuable a member of the
Administration to be cast adrift, and Earl Grey refused to part with
him. Three nights afterwards he committed another crime by
acknowledging in his place that the economy effected by his
predecessors at the Admiralty was quite equal to his own. Then
followed a discussion upon the Corn Laws, which he defended as
they stood; whereas Mr Poulett Thompson, Vice-President of the
Board of Trade, proposed to substitute a fixed duty for a sliding-
scale. And here an incident befell which deserves notice. Mr Poulett
Thompson endeavoured to confute his opponent by reading extracts
from a pamphlet which had appeared in 1830, and in which the
author, under the nom de guerre of a Cumberland Landowner,
advocated entire freedom of trade in corn, as in other commodities.
Strange to say, Sir James Graham took no notice of the ironical
cheers which followed these quotations, and which marked the
conviction of the House that the pamphlet had emanated from his
pen. Yet such was not the case. The pamphlet was the work of a Mr
Rooke, and was acknowledged as such when, four years
subsequently, the author gave to the world a volume on the science
of geology. Why Sir James Graham did not decline the honour thrust
upon him at the moment, we are at a loss to conceive, and his
biographer certainly assigns no satisfactory reason for the
proceeding.
The Cabinet worked on not very amicably, and Sir James Graham
did it what service he could by taking charge of its bill for
remodelling the Exchequer Office. But the time was come when he
felt that he could serve it no longer. Lord Wellesley’s measure for
converting tithes in Ireland into a permanent rent-charge on the land
was cumbered by a question from Mr Shiel, drawing from Lord John
Russell something like a pledge, that the Government might
hereafter consider the propriety of applying a portion of this rent-
charge to secular purposes. And a few days later Mr Ward brought
forward his motion, “That the Protestant Episcopal Establishment in
Ireland exceeds the spiritual wants of the Protestant population, and
that, it being the right of the State to regulate the distribution of
Church property in such a manner as Parliament might determine, it
is the opinion of this House ‘that the temporal possessions of the
Church of Ireland, as established by law, ought to be reduced.’”
There was no evading a movement like this. The Cabinet must either
resist or accept Mr Ward’s motion, and a majority determined to
accept it. Now, however Radical Sir James Graham’s views might be
on other points, he was then, as he always had been, a consistent
Churchman. On many previous occasions he had declared his
determination to defend to the uttermost the inviolability of what he
regarded as a fundamental institution of the Empire; and the Duke of
Richmond, Lord Ripon, and Mr Stanley agreed with him. When,
therefore, this Act for confiscating the property of the Church was
accepted by the Cabinet as its own, the four Ministers above named
felt that only one course lay open to them: they retired from the
Administration, and shook it thereby to its base.
Sir James sat below the gangway, on the Ministerial side of the
House, while those gyrations went on which ended in shaking Earl
Grey out of the Premier’s chair, and Lord Melbourne into it. With Mr
Stanley, and the half-dozen friends who adhered to him, Sir James
kept aloof from each of the rival parties, becoming one of the
company who, as Mr O’Connell described it, “travelled by themselves
in the Derby Dilly.” It is not for us to inquire into the motives which
animated the little band at that time. But considerations of delicacy
towards old friends were surely rated above their just value when
they induced Mr Stanley and Sir James Graham, a few months
subsequently, to decline taking office under Sir Robert Peel. Had
they met his advances as frankly as they deserved, the Conservative
Government of 1835 would have probably stood its ground; and
though it be difficult to conceive, looking both at things present and
things past, how the commercial system, now in the ascendant, could
have been pushed aside, still the progress of that system would have
been probably more gradual; it certainly might have achieved its
triumph at a sacrifice less costly than the disruption of the great Tory
party, which followed on the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846.
Sir James was coldly looked upon by the Liberals for abandoning
Earl Grey’s Administration, and a cabal was got up to resist his re-
election for East Cumberland in the event of his taking office with Sir
Robert Peel. He refused to take office, as we have shown, and
defended himself well at the hustings against the attacks which were
made upon him. East Cumberland chose him again to be its
representative, and he again took his seat below the gangway on the
Ministerial side of the House. As an independent member, however,
he stood aloof from the struggle between Sir Robert Peel and the
Whigs, till Lord John Russell brought forward his famous motion
“For the appropriation to secular purposes of a portion of the Church
property in Ireland.” Then Sir James Graham threw over all party
scruples. He delivered against the motion one of the most telling
speeches which he ever uttered in Parliament, and went out into the
gallery with that gallant band which failed to keep their chief in office
by twenty-five votes only. From that moment his severance from the
Whigs became a mere question of time, and the bitterness with
which the Municipal Reform Bill was argued hurried it on. Sir James
had never desired to swamp the poorer voters, either in counties or
boroughs, and voted against the extinction of the class of freemen.
Having gone out with the Tories, he was preparing to cross the
House to his old seat, when a storm of derisive cheering greeted him,
accompanied by shouts of “Stay where you are!” He stopped, looked
angrily at the benches whence the sounds proceeded, and then sat
down with a smile of scorn on his lips on one of the Opposition
benches.
For the part which he took in resisting the extension to Ireland of
the municipal changes which were effected in England and in
Scotland, Mr Torrens severely censures Sir James Graham. This is
natural enough. Going far beyond his hero in Radical propensities,
Mr Torrens dispenses blame where men of moderate views would
award praise. He seems to forget that all legislation for Ireland was
undertaken in those days with a twofold purpose only—to conciliate
Mr O’Connell, and to humble the House of Lords. The Melbourne
Ministry, however, rode their hobby too fast. Not a few of the most
distinguished of the old reformers fell off from them. Indeed, to such
a height was the spirit of alienation carried, that not Sir James
Graham only, but likewise Lord Brougham, Sir Francis Burdett, and
Lord Stanley, withdrew their names from Brookes’s, into which Mr
O’Connell had been received as a member.
From this date up to the death of William IV. in 1837, party spirit
prevailed in Parliament and out of it, with a bitterness which has no
parallel in modern times. The Ministers, existing by the breath of Mr
O’Connell and the Radicals, seemed indifferent to the consequences
of the measures which they proposed. The great body of the
Opposition, carried away by personal dislike to their opponents,
fought more than one battle which it would have been wise to avoid,
and compelled their more judicious leaders to fight with them. On
the whole, however, the Duke in the House of Lords and Sir Robert
Peel in the Commons managed matters well; and it is only just to Sir
James Graham to add, that they found in him a hearty as well as a
prudent coadjutor.
The accession of her present Majesty led, of course, to a
dissolution, and Sir James Graham had the mortification to find
himself opposed in East Cumberland by Major Aglionby, formerly
his fastest friend. He received, on the other hand, but a doubtful
support from the Conservatives, and on the day of nomination the
mob refused to hear him. Naturally proud, and perhaps a little
dissatisfied with himself, he quitted the hustings, and went to the
poll in bad heart. He was defeated by a majority of upwards of 500
votes, and withdrew, full of indignation, to Netherby. He had
suffered not long before this a heavy domestic affliction in the death
of his mother; and mortified ambition, coming on the back of private
sorrow, wellnigh broke him down. He took no further part in county
business; he shut himself out from county society, and spent his time
chiefly in reading every new book that came out, and corresponding
on important subjects with Sir Robert Peel. It was the interval
between his defeat for East Cumberland and his return to Parliament
as member for the Welsh borough of Pembroke which made him,
what he ever after continued to be, a Peelite to the backbone.
In 1838 Sir James Graham was elected Lord Rector of the
University of Glasgow, in opposition to the Duke of Sussex. He
delivered an inaugural address, which is probably still remembered
in consequence of the uproar which it called forth by certain
allusions to the necessity of keeping the Church in alliance with the
State; for then the fever of Free-Kirk folly was at its height in
Scotland. But in 1839 he had graver matters to attend to. That
systematic agitation against the Corn Laws having already begun of
which Mr Charles Villiers, and not Mr Cobden, was the author. Sir
James spoke in his place against interference with the sliding-scale;
at the same time he guarded himself from the charge of desiring to
secure a monopoly in the corn-market for the English landowner,
and went out of his way to warn the House that nothing could be
more perilous to English interests than that monopoly in the supply
of cotton which had been conceded to America. He was anxious even
then that steps should be taken to encourage the better cultivation of
the plant in India, and pressed upon the President of the Board of
Control the wisdom of originating such a scheme. Words of warning
which, disregarded at the moment, come back upon us now with a
melancholy echo!
The progress of the struggle, which ended in the withdrawal of the
Appropriation Clause and the passing of the Irish Municipal Reform
Bill through both Houses of Parliament, is of too recent date to
require that we should speak of it in detail. So is the contest which
arose about softening down some of the clauses in the New Poor-
Law, of which Sir James, though advocating the law itself, was a
strenuous advocate. His speech on that occasion, as well as his
censure of the job which pensioned Sir John Newport and raised Mr
Spring Rice to the peerage, more and more drew towards him the
sympathies of the Conservative party, which indeed had already
begun to look to him as one of its future leaders. He was equally
efficient in his attacks on the Whig mismanagement of affairs in
India and in China, and certainly did not spare his old friends when
stirred by their rebukes into invective. At last the collapse came, and
in 1841 the country declared against the Whigs. A new
Administration was formed, with Sir Robert Peel at its head. Sir
James Graham accepted the seals of the Home Office, and for five
years public affairs were carried on, if not smoothly in all respects,
with remarkable success upon the whole. No doubt, Lord Aberdeen’s
legislation in the matter of the Church of Scotland proved
unfortunate, and there was little in Sir James Graham’s manner to
reconcile the discontented portion of the Scottish clergy to the law as
it stood. Indeed, it is a remarkable fact, that almost all the failures in
Sir Robert Peel’s policy occurred on points of which the management
devolved upon Sir James Graham. To him, in a great degree, was
attributed the disruption in the Scottish Church. His bill for the
amendment of the Factory Act of 1833 hung fire, and was withdrawn;

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Gendered Identity and the Lost Female:

Hybridity as a Partial Experience in the

Literary Histories of the Early Anglophone Caribbean

Language as Identity in Colonial India: Policies and

Intercultural Experience and Identity 1st ed. Edition

Beauty, Women's Bodies and the Law: Performances in

Identity-Trajectories of Early Career Researchers:

The Lost 1st Edition Natasha Preston [Preston

Archiving Caribbean Identity: Records, Community, and

Nonhuman Agencies in the Twenty-First-Century

ISBN 978-981-19-4966-1 ISBN 978-981-19-4967-8 (eBook)

The book, in its most succinct form, is an exploration of Postcolonial

● Form a critical argument around the existing narrative of cultural

● Question the pertinence of the ongoing practice of connecting the

The book intends to address a few questions germane to the multicul-

1 Independence and Oil Boom: Hybridity

3.3 Internalized Hegemony and the Exaggeration

Shrabani Basu teaches English at Deshabandhu Mahavidyalaya, Chit-

Independence and Oil Boom: Hybridity

In the economic and sociopolitical upheaval following the Oil Boom,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Tobago, Jamaica, and to a certain extent Barbados, to the wider Anglo-

1.1 Political and Economic Change

Williams saw petroleum-based industrialization as the quickest way to

As a result, there was a stress on a more inclusive creolization ethos in the

to come together to preserve national identity. Both creolization and the

principal unit after marriage or with the increase in subsequent gener-

Within the Caribbean regional diversity of ethnicity, class, languages and

1.2 Socio-Cultural Change

while men go abroad, thereby achieving a hybrid status. Gesellschaft , on

Williams’ inaugural address after the 1962 Independence, where Williams

This new Trinidad was supposed to be a petroleum-led modern world,

1.3 Gender Politics in the Caribbean

males were particularly felt to be underachievers and was made more

resources, rather than any emasculating agenda or economic coup pulled

becomes increasingly visible further up the academic scale, with negligible

We discern that similar to every marginalization concept, this emas-

[A]scribed roles and stereotypes for succeeding generations of men and

However, this supposedly anti-essentialist notion of masculinity and femi-

Biology…pre-disposed that femininity…be defined as and females social-

Secondly, Lindsay argues that the marginalization thesis assumes that

Implicit in the marginalization thesis is the presumption that power is

This argument reminds us of Foucault’s The History of Sexuality that

The marginalization thesis thus marks a (wilful?) misrepresentation of the

Thirdly, the theories and knowledge systems that uncritically retrench

when in contact with other homogenous cultures. As a result, the iden-

Bhabha initiates the argument with the notion of “cultural transla-

responsibilities—they need to “intervene in particular struggles, in partic-

identity. One communicates while one travels through various cultures,

Hybridity thus offers a range of cultural mechanisms to create and deter-

production of iron, steel, liquid ammonia, methanol, urea, and fertilizer,

…a social process in which there was a salience of women – in their

On the other hand, the influence of matriarchy transcends the concept

Down the way where the nights are gay

…patriarchs, men of the dominant group, in defending their

Women’s liberation, thus, is indebted to and is the ultimate consequence

than an exploitation of their reproductive powers. But still, the changes

——–. Rethinking Caribbean ‘Difference’: Feminist Review 59. New York: