Book Project

"Small Places: Atlantic Archipelagoes and Literary Form" rethinks the oppositional relationship between Caribbean and Victorian literatures by analyzing the Caribbean and Britain as asymmetrical yet commensurate archipelagic cultures. "Small Places" extends the scope of archipelagic studies to defamiliarize a relationship too often understood through the binaries of colony and metropole and resistance and influence. Scholars have become accustomed to examining Caribbean literature as part of a postcolonial tradition defined by rebellious thought and hybrid poetics. The Victorian era, on the other hand, is synonymous with the height of the British Empire and its accompanying ideologies of racial hierarchy. But these conventions fall short of fully mapping the instances where Caribbean literature continues some key literary forms from the Victorian period such as the realist novel. They moreover simplify the political attitudes of many Victorian writers who—alongside their colonial ideologies—maintained contradictory and radical opinions on issues such as labor and the environment. 

By framing the Caribbean and British Isles as archipelagoes on the Atlantic, "Small Places" explores the imbricated experiences of economic dependence, cultural insularity, and industrial crisis that shape literary forms spanning from the travelogue to a mode of creative non-fiction known as sage writing. The book project dialogues with Caribbean, postcolonial, and archipelagic studies to show that the relationship between Caribbean and Victorian literatures exceeds genealogies of influence and invites a non-hierarchical comparative methodology in order to understand the reciprocal worlds from which the Caribbean and British archipelagoes emerge.