Transcending the Debt of Colonial History in George Lamming’s Season of Adventure


Abstract in English

This article re-interprets George Lamming’s theorization and presentation of language as a strategy of resistance in light of investigating the notion of the commodified self. In particular, Lamming’s Season of Adventure can be addressed as a narrative of rebellious self-purchase that construes language as a medium of historical dissent to the imposed debt of colonial history. Language in Season of Adventure is shaped by revision as it retraces both the genealogy of the individual and the past of a nation. Arguably, such a revisionary conception of language ultimately projects an alternative genealogy of opposition. In this respect, both the thematic and narrative structure of Season of Adventure transcends the European debt of history and presents a textual counter-discourse that articulates a historiography of resistance. Recent theories on the logic of debt and Lamming’s strategies of linguistic resistance featured in his non-fiction writings are central to the premise of this reading of Season of Adventure.

References used

Armstrong, Tim. The Logic of Slavery: Debt, Technology, and Pain in American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. 1981. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michel Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1992
Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphael Confiant. Éloge de la Créolité. Paris: Gallimard, 1993

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