Candace Ward (Florida State University)
This paper analyzes a little-known nineteenth-century novel that dramatizes the ways multiple cultures impacted one another during the colonial period, Trinidadian E. L. Joseph’s Warner Arundell: The Adventures of a Creole (1838). Situating the novel in the context of early creole fiction, I argue that authors like Joseph, who identified as “creoles” rather than Europeans, were aware of how the region resisted monolithic, monolingual readings. Indeed, by celebrating the pan-Caribbean identity reflected in “the mixed hue and costume of the population, and Babylonish variety of tongues” heard throughout the region, Warner Arundell anticipates emerging conversations about transnational, multilingual processes of creolization.
The celebration of diasporic, hybridized identities are clearly evident as Joseph’s multilingual hero moves across the region and beyond: he’s born in Grenada, spends his childhood in Antigua, studies law in Caracas and medicine in London; he joins Simón Bolívar’s army of independence in South America and later practices medicine in Trinidad, where he is reunited with his mixed-race family and marries a Bolivarian patriot. Arundell is a citizen of the world, a creole cosmopolite whose mobility—geographic, political, social, and cultural—enables him to transcend the frontier parochialism often satirized in metropolitan works about the Caribbean. Two figures from Caribbean history further valorize Joseph’s conceptions of creole cosmopolitanism: Simón Bolívar and Julien Fédon, the mixed-race, French-creole revolutionary who led an island-wide rebellion against the British in Grenada in 1795. But even as Joseph applauds the expansive worldview embodied by these men, he also demonstrates the tensions inherent in transnational identities as they are forced to negotiate the complexities and contradictions of creole culture along racial, social, and ideological lines. Here, too, then, Joseph’s novel anticipates many of our questions about the formation of multiple Caribbean subjectivities, and can lead us to a deeper understanding of the historical antecedents of our current “intra-Caribbean reality.”
