SEM Transculturalismes : Corentin Jégou, « Pieces of Utopia: Imagining globalisation in anglophone Caribbean literature »

Sylvia Wynter’s The Hills of Hebron (1962) and Robert Antoni’s As Flies to Whatless Boys (2013) both revolve around utopian schemes, set in Jamaica and Trinidad respectively. Wynter’s novel chronicles the establishment of a millenarian commune by Prophet Moses and his followers at the turn of the twentieth century, while Antoni’s narrative relates the tribulations of the socialistic Tropical Emigration Society in the 1840s. In both cases, the utopian enterprise meets with disaster. The prophets turn out to be charlatans, bent on personal aggrandisement at the expense of their unsuspecting disciples.

In this paper, I explore the political and aesthetic underpinnings of Wynter’s and Antoni’s failed utopias. While they both seem to share in the anti-utopian scepticism which accompanies periods of political exhaustion, is there anything to be salvaged from among the debris? Can we not at least reclaim a sense of what Fredric Jameson has called “anti-anti-Utopianism” by looking at those failures from a global perspective? While taking stock of the pessimism which permeates Wynter’s and Antoni’s works, I contend that the panorama is not quite so despairing as it would seem, and that the transnational texture of their narratives may function as an antidote to the bankruptcy of their utopian blueprints.