The “Ruination” of Englishness: Jamaican Nature and National Identity in Michelle Cliff’s Abeng
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This article examines how Michelle Cliff’s Abeng challenges the colonial notion of Englishness embodied in the great house by interfusing wild Jamaican nature and the domestic, cultured Englishness. For this purpose, I borrow Michelle Cliff’s idea of “ruination,” which she defines as a process of reformulation initiated by wild Jamaican nature in her essay “Caliban’s Daughter: The Tempest and the Teapot.” The great house in Jamaica described in the novel shows colonial Englishness, whereby Jamaicans are forced to understand themselves through the European perspectives implemented by the institutional education. Cliff’s novel, however, shows Englishness in the process of “ruination” by blurring the hierarchical binary between the cultured English great house and the wild Jamaican nature in its blending descriptions and fragmenting narratives. The image of the wild English woman who resides in a great house defies English norms of clean tidy domesticity and reshapes cultured Englishness into untamed wildness. Cliff’s Abeng reshapes the hierarchical binary between culture and nature that has justified colonialism into a connective continuum of new possibilities.
Abstract
This article examines how Michelle Cliff’s Abeng challenges the colonial notion of Englishness embodied in the great house by interfusing wild Jamaican nature and the domestic, cultured Englishness. For this purpose, I borrow Michelle Cliff’s idea of “ruination,” which she defines as a process of reformulation initiated by wild Jamaican nature in her essay “Caliban’s Daughter: The Tempest and the Teapot.” The great house in Jamaica described in the novel shows colonial Englishness, whereby Jamaicans are forced to understand themselves through the European perspectives implemented by the institutional education. Cliff’s novel, however, shows Englishness in the process of “ruination” by blurring the hierarchical binary between the cultured English great house and the wild Jamaican nature in its blending descriptions and fragmenting narratives. The image of the wild English woman who resides in a great house defies English norms of clean tidy domesticity and reshapes cultured Englishness into untamed wildness. Cliff’s Abeng reshapes the hierarchical binary between culture and nature that has justified colonialism into a connective continuum of new possibilities.
참고문헌 (32)
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