Abstract:
Recent studies on
contemporary Caribbean narratives have predominantly focused on topics such as
racism, migration, absentee fathers, multiculturalism, and displacement.
However, there are no adequate critical works on issues of violence, crime, and
resistance within Caribbean novels. This paper employs a qualitative research
approach to examine violence, crime, and resistance in Marlon James’s The Book
of Night Women and Andrea Levy’s The Long Song as Caribbean neo-slave
narratives. This research, guided by the New Historicist perspective, seeks to
demonstrate the vulnerability of slaves to various forms of violence and crime
in the Caribbean, illustrate the use of physical violence as a public spectacle
of punishment, and reveal the slaves’ inner determination to resist, as
depicted in the texts under study. The research argues that violence permeates
the texts, transcending boundaries of gender, race, class, and nationality,
with all groups contributing to and being affected by the web of violence
within the context of Jamaican/Caribbean slavery. The study, attuned to the New
Historicist critical lens, recognizes all the voices that make up the history
of that era and demonstrates how black slave women participated in Jamaican
resistance during the enslavement era. Ultimately, the paper concludes that
Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women and Andrea Levy’s The Long Song not only
portray various instances of violence, resistance, separation/child and
intra-black slave violence and crime and their implications but also create and
transform history to invite contemporary audiences to view the past through the
lens of the present within the context of Caribbean neo-slave narratives.
Keywords:
Caribbean neo-slave narratives, Violence in Caribbean literature, Resistance in
slave narratives, New Historicism, Jamaican slave resistance
DOI: www.doi.org/10.36349/tjllc.2024.v03i02.010
author/AKUSO, Ezekiel Solomon & SAJO, Rachel Alhassan
journal/Tasambo JLLC 3(2) | September 2024 |
