ISBN : 9782296059726
AUSTIN CLARKE: THE AMBIVALENCE OF THE BLACK INTELLECTUAL ELITE
Marcienne Rocard Université Toulouse-Le Mirail
The starting-point of my essay is a quotation from the Trinidad-born
novelist V.S. Naipaul: "A colony is a strange sort of society, a society without
an elite [...] The leaders come from the motherland, are people with another
culture [...]" (Naipaul, 173); his statement could indeed apply to Barbados as
well.
For three hundred and more years uninterrupted English institutions
and culture ruled over Barbados (signiMcantly dubbed "Little England").
The island Mnally gained independence within the Commonwealth in 1966.
My paper is not concerned with the political events that gradually led to
Barbados' independence from British rule, but with the cultural and political
ambiguities facing its emerging West Indian elite in their homeland and outside
the Caribbean. In this paper, I'll examine how a West Indian elite was
ambiguously bred by an educational system essentially predicated on English
culture. I will then argue that, after emigrating to