Fighting Madness, Making Caribbeanness: Kelly Baker Josephs's Disturbers of The Peace: Representations of Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature

Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, Dec 2015

Review of Kelly Baker Josephs's Disturbers of The Peace: Representations of Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature

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https://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1379&context=anthurium

Fighting Madness, Making Caribbeanness: Kelly Baker Josephs's Disturbers of The Peace: Representations of Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature

" Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal: Vol. 12 : Iss. 2 Baker Josephs's Disturbers of Th e Peace: Fighting Madness, Making Caribbeanness: Kelly Representations of Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Sheri-Marie L. Harrison Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/anthurium Recommended Citation - Literature Kelly Baker Josephs, Disturbers of the Peace: Representations of Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013), 191pp. The proliferation of mad characters in Caribbean fiction at large makes it puzzling that we were a decade into the twenty-first century before the publication of a critical study dedicated entirely to this ubiquitous literary trope, in its own right, as a distinctively Caribbean literary aesthetic. The force of Kelly Baker Josephs’ Disturbers of the Peace: Representations of Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature comes first from this identification of madness as a major, recurring preoccupation of Caribbean writing. Other strengths of this book include the flexible and multifaceted way Josephs treats and analyzes various literary manifestations of madness, her balanced reliance on Caribbean criticism to illuminate the region’s texts, and the methodological example she sets for approaching representations of madness in Caribbean fiction beyond the bounds of her own book’s focus. Disturbers of the Peace begins by citing Paul Keens-Douglas’ poem “Jus’ Like Dat” as a touchstone for establishing the varied and fluid ways in which Josephs will treat representations of madness. Of the poem’s arrangement of the word “mad,” Josephs asks, “is mad the same as mad mad and mad mad mad?” (1). The answer is no; “throughout the poem, Douglass repeatedly plays with the performative aspects of ‘losing one’s mind,’ using the slippages between insanity, anger and excessive gaiety to recreate the physical and mental experience of carnival” (1). Josephs in turn likens these slippages to the larger variation among the representations of madness and mad characters in Caribbean literature. Josephs identifies the “ubiquity of madmen and madwomen” in Anglophone Caribbean literature written between 1959 and 1980 as one of that period’s “distinguishing features.” She argues, moreover, that this feature connects the period’s literature to the concurrent shift from colonial to postcolonial status also taking place in the region, and that the engagement of madness “serves as both a social critique and a form of literary innovation in these texts” (2). The prevalence of iconic and mad characters like Rhys’ Antoinette/Annette, Naipaul’s Man-man, Wynter’s Moses Barton, and others begs the book’s organizing questions: “[w]hat function(s) do these figures serve for the writer and the represented” and how does madness figure in the varying interests inherent in decolonization (2)? In answering these questions, Josephs offers the following as “a major premise of Disturbers of the Peace”: … the slow but relatively condensed decolonization of the Anglophone islands during the 1960s and 1970s makes literature written in English during this time – what Mary Lou Emery describes as “the closing of the era of empire” – especially rich for an examination of the function of madness in literary critiques of colonialism and the Caribbean project of nation making. (3) An additional feature that makes “the closing of the era of empire” a rich location for examining the role of madness in critiquing colonialism and nation building is the proliferation of theoretical writing that “began experimenting with routes to social and mental decolonization” in this period (10). Disturbers of the Peace situates its readings of literary texts within these contemporary critical discourses, where possible reading primary texts alongside their authors’ critical writing. Chapter One reads Miguel Street and Naipaul’s fiction generally in the framework provided by his criticism; Chapter Two places Wynter’s novel The Hills of Hebron alongside her vast body of critical work; Chapter Three’s discussion of Wide Sargasso Sea utilizes the authorial logic offered by Rhys herself in her letters; Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and Jean Paul Sartre’s preface to that text are contrapuntally pivotal to parsing the schizophrenic delirium of Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain in Chapter Four; and Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks animates Chapter Five’s discussion of Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home. As Josephs rightly asserts, it is fortunate to be able to “turn directly to the authors of the fictional text under consideration for complimentary critical material” (11). But her deliberate pairing of creative and critical works bears additional fruit in the context of representations of madness, illustrating her contention that the “approach to Caribbean narratives of madness facilitates an enhanced synergism between fictional texts on madness and critical writ (...truncated)


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Sheri-Marie L Harrison. Fighting Madness, Making Caribbeanness: Kelly Baker Josephs's Disturbers of The Peace: Representations of Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature, Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, 2015, pp. 8, Volume 12, Issue 2,