Bildung or development? Rereading George Lamming and W. Arthur Lewis
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9003097 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Peter Ribic (University of Wisconsin–Madison, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 56 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 134-149 |
| Publication date | 2018-08-22 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-9894 • E-ISSN: 1741-6442 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0021989418787579 |
| OpenAlex | W2888523573 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 23 |
This article revisits two “Third World classics” published by West Indians in the UK in the immediate postwar period, George Lamming’s 1953 novel In the Castle of My Skin and the Saint Lucian economist W. Arthur Lewis’s 1954 essay “Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour”. Reading these texts against the recent wave of research on the politics and aesthetics of the postcolonial bildungsroman, I argue that Lamming’s novel can be usefully interpreted as an allegory of national formation caught between two distinct models: Bildung, which uses the metaphor of the national body to figure an incipient postcolonial nation-state; and economic “development”, which refigures national growth in terms of liberal modernization. Placing an emphasis on the distinction in these two discourses between a “nation-people” and a national “population”, the article goes on to consider the mythologized figure of the Windrush “exile”, not, or not only, as a heroic individual in pursuit of upward social (and literary) mobility, but as a narrative response to developmentalist ideology in the 1950s
Allegory · Art · Art history · Bildung · Foregrounding · George (robot · Humanities · Ideology · Literature · Metaphor · Modernization theory · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science · Theology · Australian History and Society · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies
How Europe underdeveloped Africa
The real thing
Latin America
The Report of the West India Royal Commission
Human Rights, Inc.
Caliban's Curse
Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism
Spectral Nationality
Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour
The Stages of Economic Growth
Struggling with the African Bildungsroman
Writing in Limbo
The Drama of Peripheralized Bildung
The Genre of Postcoloniality
Radical Moves
Encountering Development
The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientific Labor, circa 1950-1975
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,08 |
| Citation span | 2014 - 2014 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |