The Pleasures of Exile
by George Lamming
Caliban reads The Tempest and writes back.
For you if
you want the most intellectually ambitious Caribbean response to colonialism ever written
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Lamming uses Shakespeare's The Tempest — Prospero and Caliban, the colonizer and the colonized — as the frame for a meditation on Caribbean writing, exile, and the relationship between literature and political consciousness. Written in 1960 from London, where Lamming had emigrated. The dispatch from inside the Caribbean intellectual's impossible position: educated in the colonizer's language and literature, carrying a culture that the colonizer's academy doesn't recognize as literature. The most important Caribbean essay ever written and one of the least read.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Barbados • Caribbean
- Voice
- Written by a Barbadian author
- Topics
- colonialism
Same event, different angle
The same history — told by someone who saw it differently.
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
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