Abstract:
Claiming fictional literature as a site of resistance to coloniality, this study has two
aims. I consider critically the manifestations of (de)coloniality and decolonising
psychological work evident in selected Caribbean literature. I also use my own
fictional writing to provide a case study of how decolonial writing might be used
to illustrate and explore how other-than-Western epistemology and ontology can offer
space to re-imagine psychology and its praxis.
Creative Caribbean literature offers rich material to (re)animate psychologically
oriented thinking about identity and ‘race’ and the contemporary experiences of
racism, colourism, sexism, classism, economic exploitation, and homophobia using a
decolonial lens. This study provides a critical decolonial reading of Jamaican
Literature as a Subset of Caribbean Literature. I explore whether and how fiction,
inspired by a decolonial turn, opens spaces for psychological oriented decolonial
work. I underline the tensions in the shifts between coloniality and decoloniality in
Jamaican writing including novels, anthologies of short stories, and poetry.
The conceptual schemas that underpin my practices of reading, thinking, and writing as both researcher and creative, are simultaneously decolonial theory and decolonial
methodology. As such, the theory-methodology for this study is framed as
interconnected concepts and ideas derived from Critical Race Theory, Black
Feminisms, and Afrocentric and decolonial thought. The derived key decolonising
practices include Critical Relationality and Scepticism, Intersectionality, Border Crossing, Inscriptions of Indigeneity, Afro-Creolised Aesthetics, Faithful Witnessing,
and Linguistic and Conceptual Subversions.
