Introduction: Archival Dreams and Caribbean Life Writing

Jocelyn F E N T O N Stitt

2021, Dreams of Archives Unfolded

In 1838, twenty-one years after the abolition of the slave trade, four years after emancipation, during the last year of required apprenticeship in the British West Indies, a minor Jamaican newspaper printed a ghostly communiqué from the future. Dated May 2, 1938, the letter described itself as subverting linear Eu ro pean time, instead conforming to the disruptions and disjunctures of temporality in the Ca rib be an: "The following letter was not received by any of the West India mails. The post could not have brought it. It may seem to be antedated, if we compute by the aera [sic] of the Old World; but clocks go much faster in the New. .. this certainly rather suspicious forestallment of the Eu ropean chronology, forbids the announcement of any further particulars." 1 "A Brief Account and Familiar Description of Jamaica in its Most Modern Statistics" is arguably the earliest form of utopian and speculative fiction set in a recognizably Ca rib bean future society. 2 It creates an amalgam of characteristics of Eu ro pean modernity within the supposed Edenic space of the tropics. As impor tant, the narrative uses the autobiographical genre of the travelogue to provide a first-person account of Jamaica in 1938. Arriving in Jamaica, the narrator rhapsodizes that "a den of debasement has been converted into a theatre of glory.. .. It is a paradise of God!" The writer imagines a postslavery Jamaica free of vio lence and full of re spect for the rule of law, where "murder has not been known since the white man forebore to kill the black." Po liti cal equality has been established and colorism abolished: "The Assembly comprises a few whites, but the large majority consists of the dark population, through all its shades.. .. Between these exists no rivalry." After establishing Jamaica as thriving post-emancipation society, the second installment begins by emphasizing that the museum and the archive, technologies of memory, are institutions as impor tant as the church and the legislature. The museum, located presciently in Kingston-the Institute of Jamaica would