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A compelling and intricate novel of emigration and the effects of colonialism on a people
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Immigration and Loss of Identity
In Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe narrates the disruptive effect European colonisation has on old tribal ways of life. In George Lamming's The Emigrants (1954)the movement is the other way round: a group of WestIndians immigrates to London in search of a better future. During thevoyage on the ship, told as a kind of rite of passage from their old to thenew world, they share past experiences, dreams, hopes and ambitions. Thevoyage however doesn't prepare them for the life of outcasts that awaitsthem in London, and the subsequent loss of identity. The form of thenarrative adjusts itself to its theme: its continuous flow, which narratesthe voyage, breaks up into several trails following the individualdestinies that lose themselves in the smoke of London. Though not as greatas In The Castle of my Skin, which I think Mr. Lamming's greatest novel, itis an intense book about immigration, cultural chock and loss of identity. ... Read more

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Coming of Age in a Strange World
Lamming's "coming of age" novel depicts the life of a precocious adolescent, G, who is trying to understand the colonial, grown-up world. The innocence of G is balanced against the decadence of his environment. Read also, Michael Anthony's The Year in San Fernando and Austin Calrke's, Growing Up Stupid Under Union Jack to fully understand Lamming's achievement.

A brilliant modern Caribbean masterpiece!
George Lamming, along with other Caribbean writers such as V.S. Naipaul and V.S. Reid, broke through the Victorian box of post-World War II, pre-independence British colonial writing.Their styles are all different but their message is generally the same: trying to grapple with the major issues of politics, race, and self-worth.Lamming's description of G's life (which can be paralleled to James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man") draws the reader into the decadent colonial world of the pre-World War II Barbados.Lamming's style haunts and amuses but ultimately almost confuses; read this carefully to understand the true meaning of the book.

"a must read"
The more I attempt to say about Mr Lamming's beautifully descriptive and uniquely refreshing style the more disservice I do to this marvelous work.If you have a Carribean, colonial or post colonial experience asI do, this novel is what they call "a must read".It evoked memories and thoughts in me long forgotten.You will find yourself laughing out aloud - which I did continuously on the E train to the point where I am sure my fellow riders thought me a lunatic.Above all this novel conveys a truth about the way we lived and live.It examines the march of time and the complexities and consequences of change and transition from the perspective of a Caribbean village.I am writing this as I search ... for more of Lamming's works.

Growing aware of the Castle
"In the Castle of my Skin" is a highly poetic account of growing up in the black community of Barbadoes. Lamming gives us a vivid picture of G's family, his friends, his school and village life. Interwoven with G'severyday experience is his awareness of what it means being black and beingpoor in a somehow secluded island community. Lamming's teatment of racismis sober and sensitive. It's the more effective because it shows howinseparable its perception is from the growing awareness a young black boyhas of himself. There is much more violence in this as in many a bloodybattle. In it's poetic language,the vividness of its characters andscenery,the deep psychological insight and the sober and just treatment ofthe growing awareness of differences in the context of Carribean historythis novel is a masterpiece of universal literature.It certainly can beread as "the portrait of a young artist"; The reference of themain character's initial to Lamming's first name George seems prettyobvious. But if a portrait, its an excellent one!

How Barbados came of age
George Lamming's "In the Castle of My Skin"skilfully depicts the Barbadian psyche.Set against the backdrop of the 1930s riots which helped to pave the way for Independence and the modern Barbados, throughthe eyes of a young boy, Lammingportrays the social, racial,politicaland urban struggles with which Barbados continues to grapple even with some thirty-three years of Political Independence from Britain.Requiredreading for all Caribbean people.The novel also offers non-Barbadians andnon-Caribbean peopleinsight into the modern social history of Barbadosand the Caribbean. ... Read more

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One of the most influential books of my life!
Provides a powerful and insightful analysis on racism and colonization.Through his characters, Lamming paints a clear picture that allows us to see how racism not only affects its victims, but how it is also perpetuatedby its victims. This book explains how and why "sellouts,""Uncle Toms" and "Tio Tacos" exist. ... Read more

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Political philosophy, Literature, Caribbean history, Language studies. According to Prof. Anthony Bogues: The Sovereignty of the Imagination gives us that capacity for language and therefore the ability to name and establish categories. But this is not just a literary capacity; it allows us to define freedom. George Lamming recognizes the centrality of the quest for freedom for the social group that he calls 'this world of men and women from down below.' ... Read more

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An insightful exploration of the nature of race and ethnicity in colonial and postcolonial Caribbean societies, this tale follows the charismatic Isaac Shepherd, who returns to the island of San Cristobal to lead an independence movement that unites the island’s diverse groups against the colonial establishment. However, mutual suspicions arise as the groups fail to communicate openly about their different perspectives on colonialism, making them all vulnerable. Paralleling the world of political turmoil is the bond between Ma Shepherd, Isaac's mother, and the sons of the sparring politicians, including the white son of a reactionary chief of police. Tense and tragic, this novel delves into the implications of ethnic difference as it investigates the process of perception, communication, and knowledge.

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Monographs in original English with French translation (essays on history, culture; Western/Caribbean intellectual tradition; critical analysis. Translation by Daniella Jeffry), Second printing (c) 2000. ... Read more

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This book offers a timely critique of the work of the Barbadian novelist George Lamming, examining the ways in which his novels exhibit the "luxury of nationalist despair" and exploring the tensions between his strongly voiced anti-colonialism and his ambiguously articulated politics of self. Although stressing the place occupied by Lamming and his work in the context of an anti-colonial first generation of 'nation-writing' that has emerged in the formerly colonized world over the past half-century, the study also addresses the novelist's problematic, reductive focus on a nationalist project that is ultimately deeply flawed - in essence, the result of an uneasy relationship between form and thesis. Lamming's continued struggle with the novel as a genre, especially with its ability to get beyond the cultural and political baggage of colonialism, demonstrates the power of one of his most poignant assertions: "the colonial experience [...] is a continuing psychic experience that has to be dealt with long after the actual situation formally 'ends'."
Written from a postcolonial perspective, the study draws also on contemporary feminist criticism in order to examine Lamming's characteristically simplistic depiction of female characters in terms of a greater willingness to embody the neocolonial. The book starts by addressing the place Lamming's work occupies both within postcolonial writing at large and specifically within Caribbean literature. Subsequent chapters provide close textual readings of Lamming's six novels, paired in terms of their foregrounding of issues of race, gender and class. Despite a clear shift in Lamming's thematic focus on the rewriting of Caliban's project, with his last novel offering a basis for a re-imagining of the post/colonial encounter, there remains a perturbing inability to relinquish the privileged stance afforded the postcolonial intellectual in self-imposed exile (cultural, much more than geographical). The book represents an important contribution to criticism on the work of one of the most influential voices in postcolonial literature of the last fifty years. ... Read more

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Ever present in the work of contemporary Barbadian novelist George Lamming, author of In the Castle of My Skin, Natives of My Person, The Emigrants, and The Pleasures of Exile, are the subjects of history and revolution. In Caliban's Curse, Supriya M. Nair traces these themes and situates Lamming's work within the ongoing discourses of nationalism and identity. Retracing the history of colonial intervention in the anglophone Caribbean and seeking connections among Africa, the Caribbean, and England, Caliban's Curse moves beyond the popular perception of the archipelago as an ahistorical tourist paradise and presents the islands as a space populated by the tragic and triumphant cultures of the black diaspora.
Caliban's Curse draws upon a range of theories--postcolonial, Marxist, and feminist--to contextualize the black diaspora of the modern Caribbean through one of its primary anglophone novelists. Putting George Lamming in conversation with such contemporaries as C.L.R. James, Derek Walcott, and Wilson Harris, Nair argues that Lamming's works expand the protest of Shakespeare's Caliban to articulate a reinvention of Caribbean cultures. Both cursed by and cursing the weight of colonial history, Lamming works against the paralysis induced by such an encounter; his work serves to rewrite canonical icons and to reimagine popular cultures.
"Supriya Nair writes about the problems of history and social revolution with passion and clarity and an amazing range of critical and cultural reference. . . . She brings to existing studies of Lamming a wide and sustained knowledge of the forces that have shaped the West Indian novel, and the wider postcolonial debates in which these novels are read and discussed." --Simon Gikandi, University of Michigan
Supriya Nair is Associate Professor of English, Tulane University.
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An examination of the effects of colonialism on those who are held in check.
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Still applicable to contemporary notions of immigration and exile
Although published in 1960, this collection of essays still carries vast currency.This is a fantastic example of "historical revisionism" in that Prospero and Caliban have their relationship subverted and reformulated.As a descendant of slaves and the product of Western culture (he convincingly makes the case that all of us are either the latter or both), George Lamming realizes that we can't reject our past, but only grow from realizing what it means to us.Out of this tradition we can forge towards a hopeful future, neither forgetting nor refusing to let go of history.We have a responsibility to act for a better future, and Lamming articulates this in myriad splendid ways, through what he says is "one man's experience."

Wouldn't have read it if it weren't required
This book was interesting and well written, weaving the themes of slavery and oppression with the characters of a Shakespeare play. Although I admire the author's perseverence with the theme, I found it tiring and often hard to get into. I read it for a class and can't say I would've given it a second glance otherwise. ... Read more

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"For Lamming, one terror of the old colonial empire was what he calls 'the terror of the mind', a peculiar toxic form of hegemony which seeks to shape and bend the subject it rules. In the present world the dominant hegemony hopes to bend us to its will and shape our very desires. In such a context, the sovereignty of the imagination becomes one foundation for the imagining and desire for freedom." -- Taken from the introduction by Anthony Bogues ... Read more

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A haunting novel
This is the story of a group of West Indian artists in London.It's frightening because it's West Indian.The violence of it's action, far from catering to a mindless sensationalism, works in the service of a fictional imagination that's deeply political. ... Read more

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book
my book was old but it was for school, it lasted enough for me to do my paper ... Read more

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A compelling novel of slavery and colonialism.
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This digital document is an article from Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, 2nd ed., brought to you by Gale®, a part of Cengage Learning, a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses.The length of the article is 666 words.The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase.You can view it with any web browser.The Early Civilizations in the Americas Reference Library provides a comprehensive overview of the history of the regions of the American continents in which two of the world's first civilizations developed: Mesoamerica (the name for the lands in which ancient civilizations arose in Central America and Mexico) and the Andes Mountains region of South America (in present-day Peru and parts of Bolivia, northern Argentina, and Ecuador). In both regions, the history of civilization goes back thousands of years. ... Read more

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Chapters: Kamau Brathwaite, George Lamming, Frank Collymore, Odimumba Kwamdela. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 20. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Edward Kamau Brathwaite (born May 11, 1930) is one of the major voices in the Caribbean literary canon. Brathwaite is the 2006 International Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, for his volume of poetry, Born to Slow Horses. A holder of an honorary Ph.D. from the University of Sussex and co-founder of the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), Brathwaite has received both the Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships, and is a winner of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Bussa Award, the Casa de las Américas Prize, and the Charity Randall Prize for Performance and Written Poetry. Brathwaite is noted for his studies of Black cultural life both in Africa and throughout the African diasporas of the world in works such as Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica; The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820; Contradictory Omens; Afternoon of the Status Crow; and History of the Voice. Kamau Brathwaite was born Lawson Edward Brathwaite, May 11, 1930 in the capital city of Barbados, Bridgetown. In 1945 he attended school at the Harrison College in Barbados and in 1949 he won the Barbados Scholarship and attended Cambridge University. In 1953, Brathwaite went on to receive an honors B.A. at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and he also began his association with the BBC's Caribbean Voices Program in London. In 1954, he received a Diploma of Education from Pembroke College, Cambridge; the year 1955 found Brathwaite working as an Education Officer on the Gold Coast/Ghana with the Ministry of Education. It was in 1960 that Brathwaite married the Guyanese Doris Monica Wellcome Guyana, in Guyana, while he was on leave from Ghana. While ...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=1137083 ... Read more

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Chapters: Eric D. Walrond, George Lamming, Glenville Lovell. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 18. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Eric Derwent Walrond (December 18, 1898 - August 8, 1966) was an African-American Harlem Renaissance writer, who made a lasting contribution to literature; his work still being in print today as a classic of its era. He was well-travelled, being born in Georgetown, Guyana (British Guiana) the son of a Barbadian mother and a Guyanese father, moving early in life to live in Barbados, and then Panama, New York, and eventually England. Eric Walrond's most famous book was Tropic Death, published in New York City in 1926 when he was 28, in which he brought together ten stories, at least one of which had been previously published in small magazines. He had published other short stories prior to this, as well as a number of essays. The scholar Kenneth Ramchand described Walrond's book as a 'blistering' work of the imagination; others described his work as 'impressionistic' and 'frequently telegraphic', reflecting his use of short sentences. The following extract from his short story, Subjection, illustrates his more lyrical narrative style, A ram-shackle body, dark in the ungentle spots exposing it, jogged, reeled and fell at the tip of a white bludgeon. Forced a dent in the crisp caked earth. An isolated ear lay limp and juicy, like some exhausted leaf or flower, half joined to the tree whence it sprang. Only the sticky milk flooding it was crimson, crimsoning the dust and earth.Much of the dialogue between Walrond's characters is written in dialect, using the many different tongues loosely centered on the English language to portray the diversity of characters associated with the Pan-Caribbean diaspora. When Eric Walrond was eight, his father left, and he m...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=11145689 ... Read more