Conviviality in (Post)Colonial Societies: Caribbean Literature in the Nineteenth Century

The Caribbean has in recent decades consistently been one of the privileged sites for theoretical production, including the attempt to look concretely at conviviality in the Caribbean and its diaspora. One question that is still being asked is how to grasp ethnic difference without falling back into essentialisms. This paper asks about the norms and the forms of knowledge about conviviality in Caribbean literatures of the nineteenth century, as the discourses of racism were being established and the question of conviviality was negotiated very intensely. The question is to what degree it is possible to critically challenge essentialist constructions in an era that has gone down in history as the heyday of racism. Can a sharper look at representations of conviviality lead us to relativize canonized frames of nineteenth-century reference, such as race and nation?