Modernin muukalaiset ja tieteen takapihat:

Karibia länsimaisen modernin kääntöpuolena Michelle Cliffin romaanituotannossa

• Kaisa Immonen Suomen Akatemia ja Helsingin yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30665/av.74628

Abstract

Backyards of Modern Thought. The Caribbean as the flipside of Western Modernity in the Novels of Michelle Cliff.

This article analyzes the multifaceted relationship of the colonial Caribbean and the Western modernity. The Caribbean Islands have often been regarded as “granary” of luxury commodities for Western consumption. Sugar, rum, coffee and tobacco were imported to Europe in order to satisfy the consumption needs of the rising middle class. At the same time the Caribbean was imagined as a fantasmatic and adventurous paradise, the liminal space for defining Western subject and agency. In this article I argue that the Caribbean, a site where the Western world encountered its others for the very first time, was constructed as a flipside of Western Modernity. The colonial Caribbean became a “tabula rasa” on which European hegemonic ideas, structures and discourses were written. By examining Caribbean cultures and literature we are able to re-think the reflections and shadows of modern thinking.

In her novels the Jamaican American author Michelle Cliff has richly discussed the various effects of colonialism and imperial epistemes set in the Caribbean. Her novels criticize the hegemonic myths of Western thinking such as race and racism, gender binaries and Enlightenment rationalism. Cliff’s novels reveal the violence of colonial epistemologies and modern mythologies which continue to haunt the postcolonial Caribbean. By reading Cliff’s novels my aim is to analyze the paradigms or grand narratives of Western Modernity as well as to render visible the role of the Caribbean as a flipside of these narratives which are masked as universal.