Introduction

James Epstein

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511760204.002

Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012

James Epstein

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James Epstein: Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University, Tennessee

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Summary

V. S. Naipaul's book A Way in the World (1994) is perhaps most strikingly about obsession. About historical figures obsessed by an idea: about dreams of new worlds, the fulfillment of large schemes, and the universal failure of such visions. In his long chapter “In the Gulf of Desolation: An Unwritten Story,” Naipaul imagines the wasted year that the Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda – the man who came before Simón Bolívar – spent on the island of Trinidad in 1806, marooned after an abortive insurrection across the gulf on the mainland of Venezuela. Nine years before Miranda's arrival in Port of Spain, Trinidad had been part of Venezuela and the Spanish empire. “Now it is a British territory,” writes Naipaul. “Most of the island is forest, but it is empty forest: the aboriginal population has almost ceased to exist.” He continues by describing the social and racial composition of the island:

The planters are refugees from Haiti and other French-speaking islands to the north. The planters are not all white. There are many mulattoes and blacks among them, and they are known, in the caste language of the time, as “free people of colour;” they are not called Negroes. An usually high proportion of the slaves in Trinidad are “new Negroes”, freshly imported from Africa.

The island is dominated by plantations: no place “for a metropolitan man like Miranda.”

Type: Chapter
Information: Scandal of Colonial Rule
Power and Subversion in the British Atlantic during the Age of Revolution
, pp. 1 - 12

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511760204.002 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2012

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