Strolling in the Ruins
The Caribbean’s Non-sovereign Modern in the Early Twentieth Century
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Duke University Press
Published:17th Mar '23
Should be back in stock very soon
This hardback is available in another edition too:
- Paperback£20.99(9781478019688)

In Strolling in the Ruins Faith Smith engages with a period in the history of the Anglophone Caribbean often overlooked as nondescript, quiet, and embarrassingly pro-imperial within the larger narrative of Jamaican and Trinidadian nationalism. Between the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion and World War I, British imperialism was taken for granted among both elites and ordinary people, while nationalist discourses would not begin to shape political imagination in the West Indies for decades. Smith argues that this moment, far from being uneventful, disrupts the inevitability of nationhood in the mid-twentieth century and anticipates the Caribbean’s present-day relationship to global power. Smith assembles and analyzes a diverse set of texts, from Carnival songs, poems, and novels to newspapers, photographs, and gardens, to examine theoretical and literary-historiographic questions concerning time and temporality, empire and diaspora, immigration and indigeneity, gender and the politics of desire, Africa’s place within Caribbeanist discourse, and the idea of the Caribbean itself. Closely examining these cultural expressions of apparent quiescence, Smith locates the quiet violence of colonial rule and the insistence of colonial subjects on making meaningful lives.
"Against the narrative of heroic sovereignty that has dominated Caribbean literary history, Faith Smith suggests the advantages of slowing down, of caution, of waiting, of strolling. . . . [T]his book strolls, too, eschewing any untoward rush to judgment or conclusion, taking its time, exploring side streets and alleyways, emerging onto the main thoroughfare from unexpected directions. It always makes us look anew, look differently. We could not ask for a better guide." -- Peter Hulme * New West Indian Guide *
ISBN: 9781478017042
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 544g
280 pages