"When you take thing out the earth and you en't put nothing back": Nature, Form and the Metabolic Rift in Jan Carew's Black Midas  

Oleh:

Niblett, Michael

Jenis: Article from Article
Dalam koleksi: The Journal of Commonwealth Literature vol. 46 no. 2 (Jun. 2011), page 237-255.
Topik: Jan Carew; Black Midas; imperialism; ecology; metabolic rift; aesthetics
Fulltext: When you take thing out the earth and you.pdf (368.47KB)

Isi artikel

This article examines Jan Carew’s 1958 novel Black Midas and its mediation of the environmental legacies of the colonial penetration of Guyana. I suggest that the ecological changes wrought by the forcible integration of the Caribbean into the capitalist world-system constitute a “trauma” that, like the traumas of slavery and the decimation of the indigenous peoples, haunts literary texts from the region. The article focuses in particular on the impact of what John Bellamy Foster, following Marx, calls the metabolic rift – the rupture in the interaction between human beings and the earth caused by the antagonistic relationship capitalism sets up between town and country, or metropole and colony. I argue that the generic discontinuities and formal quirks of Carew’s novel can be read as mediating the structural limits to development imposed by ecological imperialism and the metabolic rift, the dynamics of which imprint themselves on the aesthetics of the text.

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