Imagining race and identity in the reading and writing of Caribbean literature: a decolonial psychological perspective

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.