John Jacob Thomas (1841-1889) was one of the leading members of
a newly emergent intelligentsia in nineteenth-century Trinidad--a
group that could be identified as both "Victorian" and
"Pan-Africanist"--who not only challenged British imperialist
accounts of Trinidad but also tried to show the interconnections,
bloodlines, and origins of "Caribbean" and "English" identities
usually perceived as separate and distinct. As a member of that
emerging black lower middle class, Thomas was well known for his
1869 study of Trinidad's Creole language, as well as for Froudacity
(1889), his pointed and witty response to the travel narrative of
the Victorian James Anthony Froude, an early example of "writing
back to empire."
Responding to Trinidad's transformation by significant
migrations from the eastern Caribbean, West Africa, and the Indian
subcontinent, he sought to "tame" the working-class energies that
radicalized his work and to bring them in line with "modern"
conceptions of the nation. As a defender of francophone cultural
production in a British colony, though a loyal subject of Queen
Victoria, and as a pan-Africanist whose commitments were
simultaneously diasporic and local, Thomas complicates current
discussions of colonial and postcolonial intellectuals, Black
Atlantic paradigms, and Victorian intellectual life.
In Creole Recitations, the first full-length study of Thomas,
Faith Smith puts his texts in dialogue with other narratives by
local and international Pan-Africanists, Victorian intellectuals,
and local and regional blacks, coloreds, and whites. Shedding light
on the intellectual terrain of the late nineteenth century, she
provides an important context for better-known figures of
twentieth-century Caribbean literature such as C. L. R. James, V.
S. Naipaul, and Jamaica Kincaid.
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