Plantation landscapes and the colonial legacy in V. S. Naipaul’s the middle passage

Abstract EN

The negotiation of the politics and poetics of plantation landscapes has recently become a major concern in postcolonial studies (De Loughrey 2015, 2011).

With a particular focus on V.

S.

Naipaul's The Middle Passage: The Caribbean Revisited (2002), this paper examines the historical signification and power politics of the sugarcane plantation landscapes in the Caribbean islands.

Within the emergent field of environmental humanities, the study draws on E.

Glissant (1999) and E.

Deloughrey (2001, 2015) for useful conceptions in relation to the interplay of the natural and the human, the material and the discursive as mutually constitutive to the representation of the land.

Naipaul's literary configuration of the plantation landscapes in the West Indies represents the ruptures and discontinuities inflicted by European colonialism.

In this particular geopolitical and discursive context, human and non-human elements of landscape and seascape form a dialectical relation that continue to assert the agency of colonial and postcolonial interventions in the palimpsest of the Caribbean topography.