[Book review of] Island paradise: the myth an examination of contemporary caribbean and sri lankan writing by Melanie A. Murray

Abstract

"The colonial inscription of islands as paradisiacal opened up these spaces for co-option into the colonial imaginary in a number of ways: as romantic Edenic spaces, depopulated landscapes ripe for commercial agricultural exploitation or as rich biological storehouses for scientific classification and cataloguing. As Island Paradise: The Myth shows, these were mutually reinforcing categories which ultimately served to rationalize domestication, domination and exploitation. Melanie Murray’s comparative study explores how the paradise myth is reworked by a set of contemporary, mostly diasporic, Caribbean and Sri Lankan postcolonial writers. The complex subjectivities of these writers and their agonistic relationship to a shared history of colonialism form the point of departure for Murray’s study. The introductory chapter begins with a perceptive overview, drawing on a range of critical studies on colonial discourse, of the paradise myth in colonial narratives ranging from the travel writing of Marco Polo to the quasi-archetypal figure of Robison Crusoe. The focus then shifts to document both indigenous understandings of place and to trace how the colonial notion of paradise influenced local literary traditions. The Caribbean has often been a focal point in postcolonial thinking on the construction or invention of identity and a process of postcolonial reinvention of culture, given the syncretic nature of the Caribbean experience. While Sri Lanka’s long colonial experience also resulted in such cultural confluence the colonial and postcolonial histories of the two locations differ significantly—a difference that is inadequately captured in this study."(pg 1)