The Material Imperialism of the Home in Paule Marshall’s The Chosen Place, The Timeless People
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20156582 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Brian Bartell (ArtCenter College of Design, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 36 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 25-42 |
| Publication date | 2020-01-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Literary Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0256-4718 • E-ISSN: 1753-5387 |
| Publisher | Unisa Press (PUBLISHER • ZA) |
| DOI | 10.1080/02564718.2020.1738713 |
| OpenAlex | W3024238862 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 16 |
“The Material Imperialism of the Home” in Paule Marshall’s The Chosen Place, The Timeless People argues that in the fictional Caribbean country Bourne Island, where this novel about post-World War II development is set, home is understood as a conflicted site of technological and material structures left over from slavery and colonialism. It further focuses on the novel’s narration of how global transformations in the economy and the development of new technological ideologies that were connected to histories of slavery and processes of racialisation emerged not just in imperial centres, but also in the quotidian places of the Caribbean home. The first part of the article considers the different ways that the “Timeless People” and protagonist Merle Kinbona experience home as an entanglement with the colonial and slave past, and how this condition affects their potential futures. The second half of the article looks at the novel’s treatment of cybernetic and information technologies through the character of white anthropologist Allen Fuso and how his efforts to resist becoming a United States-based domestic, heteronormative, “IBM Machine” are related to histories of racial oppression, technology, imperialism, and new forms of value extraction
Aesthetics · Art · Colonialism · Futures contract · Ideology · Literature · Narrative · Oppression · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Timeless · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction
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The Black Jacobins
The Plantation Machine
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Ghosts in the Posthuman Machine
I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess
The Force of Things
The Time of Slavery
Feenin
The Sound of Culture
Imperial Debris
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |