ideology of the British West Indies.
Production of the indigenous novel in the British colonies of the Caribbean begins in Jamaica, not as a regional enterprise but as an insular and colonial undertaking. The architects of this enterprise were two white Jamaicans, Thomas MacDermot t (1870–1933) and Herbert G. de Lisser (1878–1944), who had no moral or intellectual commitment to an independent Jamaica. MacDermott used his influence as editor of the Jamaica Times to establish 'The All Jamaica Library' in 1904. He intended to publish and market poetry, fiction, history, and essays that dealt 'directly with Jamaica and Jamaicans.' Two of MacDermott's novels were published by 'The All Jamaica Library' under the pseudonym of Tom Redcam: Becka's Buckra Baby (1904) and One Brown Girl and — : A Jamaican Story (1909). Despite his intimacy with Jamaican life there is a pronounced sense of otherness in MacDermott's relationship to his African-Jamaican subjects that reflects a colonial Jamaica divided by race, class, and ethnicity.
Herbert G. de Lisser, editor of the Gleaner, shared MacDermott's interest in Jamaica's cultural distinctiveness within the constraints of a 'Jamaica directly owing allegiance to the mother- country.' He published ten novels altogether, three of which were published in Jamaica. 'The All Jamaica Library' was not financially viable, but de Lisser was committed to the idea of providing Jamaican literature to a Jamaican audience at an affordable price. Five of de Lisser's novels were historical romances, the most famous of which is The White Witch of Rosehall (1929), a sensational account of Jamaica's brutal history. Three of his novels dealt with the Jamaican middle and upper -590- classes, and two with the Jamaican working poor. Given the subsequent preoccupation of West Indian novelists with the region's African and Indian majority, the most interesting of these is his first, Jane's Career (1914), or Jane: A Story of Jamaica, which was published locally in 1913. The central character is a young black Jamaican who goes to Kingston to work as a domestic and eventually finds the happiness and security she seeks in marriage. However, despite de Lisser's passionate interest in Jamaica and Jamaicans, the sympathy he extends to his heroine is qualified by his condescending and, at times, contemptuous treatment of the poor and black. His other novel about the Jamaican working class, Susan Proudleigh (1915), is set in Panama where Jamaican laborers work under terrible conditions. It is interesting as the first West Indian novel of expatriation and is similarly disfigured by a racist stereotyping of the black working class.
Claude McKay is the first of the major novelists of the Englishspeaking Caribbean to emigrate and achieve international recognition as a writer. McKay immigrated to the United States in 1912 and never returned. He wrote three novels celebrating black life and culture, Home to Harlem (1928), Banjo (1929), and Banana Bottom (1933). The first is set in Harlem and the second in Marseilles. In Banjo, black characters from the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa meet to discover and appreciate their cultural difference. The central characters are men on the move, however, expatriates who are either unable or unwilling to commit themselves to family and community.
Banana Bottom posits different values. Major tropes of the Caribbean novel are drawn here with an exemplary specificity and concreteness. This is a novel of departure and repatriation, in which the Jamaican heroine, Bita Plant, educated away from her peasant origins by a well-intentioned Jamaican minister and his English wife, is restored to her family and community. The organizing center of value in the novel is the language, belief systems, the ethics and mores of the Jamaican peasantry. Unlike MacDermott and de Lisser, McKay recognizes and affirms the syncretic character of Jamaican culture as fundamentally African. McKay's Jamaican idyll is an expatriate affair; it is shaped by a memory of home, travel in the United States, Europe, Russia, and North Africa. There is no sense of collective -591- Caribbean identity here, though there is a pan-Africanist evocation of Africa as the cornerstone of Jamaican life and culture that is fundamentally anticolonial and anticapitalist.
Within the British West Indian colonies, a cultural nationalism of a different sort was being forged by communities of writers and intellectuals who chafed under the humiliations of British colonial rule. In Trinidad, two short-lived antiestablishment reviews, The Beacon (1931-33, 1939) and Trinidad (1929-30), provided a forum for young writers like C. L. R. James, Alfred H. Mendes, and Ralph de Boissiere. These were political as well as literary reviews; they were anticolonial, anti- imperial, anticapitalist, and, reflective of their wideranging interests, they published articles on local and world politics, on African and Indian history and culture, as well as short fiction and poetry. They made an explicit connection between aesthetics and national politics. They insisted on specificity and concreteness; they demanded authenticity in West Indian settings, speech, characters, and situations, and inspired fiction rooted in an indigenous reality. Writing out of these values, Mendes and James pioneered the novel of the barrack-yard, described by James in his story 'Triumph' as a type of slum dwelling with 'a narrow gateway, leading into a fairly big yard, on either side of which run long low buildings, consisting of anything from four to eighteen rooms, each about twelve feet square.' The novel of the yard would be taken to new heights by the Jamaican novelists Roger Mais and Orlando Patterson, and the Trinidadian Earl Lovelace. The social realism of James's Minty Alley (1936) and Mendes's Pitch Lake (1934) and Black Fauns (1935) deepened the representation of native space as fundamentally poor and black though they were themselves middle class by birth and education. They depicted the pain and squalor of the everyday life of the urban working poor — domestic servants, carters, porters, prostitutes, and washerwomen — and were obsessed with its vitality and intensity when compared with the predictability and safety of their own lives. They wrote out of an awareness that what they depicted was representative of the larger Caribbean, but what they depicted was characterized in the specifics of their native island.
Both James and Mendes left Trinidad in 1932. James went to England to become a major black intellectual of our time. He wrote extensively on culture and politics, and had a foundational influence -592- on cultural production in the Caribbean. He stated the case for selfgovernment in The Case for West Indian Self- Government (1933). In his groundbreaking The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938), he linked the genesis of the West Indian personality to the economic and cultural complexities of the Haitian revolution. Minty Alley was his only novel. Mendes went to the United States. Ralph de Boissiere immigrated to Australia in 1948, where he published two novels about life in Trinidad in the 1930s and 1940s, Crown Jewel (1952) and a sequel, Rum and Coca Cola (1956). De Boissiere's novels are broader in scope than those of James and Mendes. They deal with class and racial conflict, with social unrest and the growing militancy of the labor movement in Trinidad. His indictment of the middle class is harsh and uncompromising; his sympathies are with a resistant militant working class.
The emigration of these writers with their highly defined insular depictions of native space would become the norm for the West Indian writer in search of an audience and a publisher. There were no publishers in the British West Indies that could support them and a very limited audience for their work. The majority of novelists of the next generation would go to England and, ironically, their sense of exile would strengthen the idea of a collective West Indian community. For all of them, expatriation would be a process of reeducation interwoven with the withdrawal of the British Empire and the restructuring of life in a politically independent Federated West Indies. Interisland cultural exchange prompted new levels of self-awareness at home and in the United Kingdom. Reviews like The Beacon, Kykover-al (1945-61) in Guyana, Bim (1942-) in Barbados, Focus (1943, 1948, 1956, 1960) in Jamaica, and the British Broadcasting Service's weekly edition of 'Caribbean Voices' had helped to shape and define the literature of the region as both a regional and national as well as a territorial enterprise, as West Indian as well as Jamaican or Trinidadian or Barbadian or Guyanese. Communities of writers congregated around the editing and publication of these reviews. Jamaican novelists like Vic Reid, John Hearne, and Roger Mais all published in Focus. Edgar Mittelholzer and Wilson Harris published in Kyk-over- al, and Bim drew contributions from all over the British West Indies. In The West Indian Novel and Its Background (1970), Kenneth Ramchand notes that between 1949 and 1959, fifty-five -593- novels by twenty-five different writers from the British West Indies were published, almost all of them in the United Kingdom.
Some of the novelists to emerge in the decades following World War II are George Lamming, Wilson Harris, Sam Selvon, V. S. Naipaul, Edgar Mittelholzer, Roger Mais, John Hearne, Vic Reid, Orlando Patterson, Jan Carew,
