Reading the Text in its Worldly Situation: Marxism, Imperialism, and Contemporary Caribbean Women's Literature

Abstract

If postcolonial critics are to meet the challenge of the new imperialist ideologues, we should heed Said's call to reunite texts with their "worldly situation"–one of imperialist conquest and global inequalities. Taking contemporary Caribbean women's literature, my field of expertise, as a reference point (although in this space I can only sketch a general approach), I suggest the usefulness of established marxist categories (imperialism, class, ideology) and critical practice (as informed by Georg Lukács and Raymond Williams) for this project. In so doing I follow the many scholars in the field who hold that historical materialism provides an important corrective to the idealism of postmodernist postcolonialism.