Book contents
- Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1800–1920
- Caribbean Literature in Transition
- Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1800–1920
- Copyright page
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Literary and Generic Transitions
- Part II Cultural and Political Transitions
- Chapter 8 John Jacob Thomas and the Grammar of Freedom
- Chapter 9 How Barbados Transformed Radical British Author Eliza Fenwick into a Reactionary
- Chapter 10 Mary Seacole’s Travels and Tales
- Chapter 11 Genealogy and Nonhistory in Adolphus, A Tale
- Chapter 12 Obeah, Religion, and Nineteenth-Century Literature of the Anglophone Caribbean
- Part III The Caribbean Region in Transition
- Part IV Critical Transitions
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 11 - Genealogy and Nonhistory in Adolphus, A Tale
from Part II - Cultural and Political Transitions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2020
- Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1800–1920
- Caribbean Literature in Transition
- Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1800–1920
- Copyright page
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Literary and Generic Transitions
- Part II Cultural and Political Transitions
- Chapter 8 John Jacob Thomas and the Grammar of Freedom
- Chapter 9 How Barbados Transformed Radical British Author Eliza Fenwick into a Reactionary
- Chapter 10 Mary Seacole’s Travels and Tales
- Chapter 11 Genealogy and Nonhistory in Adolphus, A Tale
- Chapter 12 Obeah, Religion, and Nineteenth-Century Literature of the Anglophone Caribbean
- Part III The Caribbean Region in Transition
- Part IV Critical Transitions
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This essay examines the anonymous serialization of George Numa Des Sources’s novella Adolphus, A Tale (1853) in The Trinidadian, a radical Brown newspaper published in Port of Spain. The plot – a romance about a Brown Trinidadian exiled in Venezuela – mirrors Des Sources’s own emigration scheme for founding a utopian socialist colony in eastern Venezuela. Written after emancipation but set during slavery, Adolphus evinces what I call 'nonhistorical' fiction, foregrounding how the experiences of enslavement disrupt not only the temporal linearity of History (what Édouard Glissant calls 'nonhistory'), but also the ideological continuities that Georg Lukács argues define the post-1848 historical novel. By narrating an alternative past (one in which the protagonist and Simón Bolívar form a transnational alliance and collaborate to advance the mission of multiracial democracy), Des Sources forges the nonhistorical foundation for the future that his emigrant colony hoped to realize.
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- Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1800–1920 , pp. 182 - 197Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021