In the context of postcolonial literary production, the shaping forces of such a field include colonial education and its sanctification of canonical texts and aesthetic practices, but they might just as often include the elevation of ‘decolonial’ aesthetic practices, to borrow Walter Mignolo’s term, that gain an alternative form of cultural capital from their resistance to the ordained forms of the English tradition. According to such an analysis, an aesthetic strategy can also be understood as a position-taking that is shaped by a struggle for symbolic/ cultural capital. For Bourdieu, the ‘field of cultural production’ is defined by the positions that actors in the field can hold and the strategies that they can develop in order to lay claim to these positions Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.īourdieu develops the idea of a ‘position-taking’ in his work on cultural production. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This is not to oppose the aesthetic and political: instead, Lamming’s novel shows that the compositional teleologies of aesthetic and political projects are similarly exposed to the self-difference they manage, a self-difference or singularity presented as aesthetic experience. Lamming reinterprets the Romantic preoccupation with forms of aesthetic startlement in an anti-pedagogical and potentially revolutionary vision of rupture, renewal and dangerous transformation.
This countervoice shifts the concerns opened up in Walcott via Wordsworth to the context of Caribbean decolonization, suggesting a surprising affinity between George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin-traditionally interpreted as an anticolonial Bildungsroman-and Romantic languages of aesthetic relation/ extinction. It is a paradox that this process happens through Romanticism in Walcott’s poetry, but this paradox is the provocative confirmation of Wordsworth’s experience of the extinction of sense in the Two-Book Prelude: only through Romanticism’s destruction in the postcolonial text can it become an aesthetics of relation. Walcott’s poetry consistently returns to the desire to approach things in their singularity or ‘givenness’, a term I develop through the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion.
#Muse of history walcott series#
It shows how Walcott’s long poem Another Life and a series of lyric poems from throughout his career appropriate a Wordsworthian language of aesthetic negation that aims toward the extinction of existing modes of ‘sense’ or aesthetic mediation. This chapter examines Derek Walcott’s negotiation with the aesthetic tradition and his development of an emancipated poetics or ‘sense’ of the world.
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