“England was simply a world:” George Lamming’s The Emigrants as Cultural Decolonization

Abstract

While the significance of George Lamming’s second novel The Emigrants (1954) as a ground-breaking work of Black British literature is widely acknowledged, my essay re-examines it as his serious exploration of the possibility of cultural decolonization for West Indians. For the purpose, it particularly considers the implications of the psychological turmoil that some characters go through after their arrival in England, as well as the connections between the different phases of their translocation. The emigrants’ voyage destabilizes their worldview and starts to form a West Indian identity, which Lamming deems as a crucial point for cultural decolonization. Yet, their collective psychological strain, which partly results from their shocking encounter with racism in England, reveals that internalized colonial values still deeply condition their mind-set and thus stunt further development of cultural decolonization. The novel’s ending, however, subtly points to the emergence of a newer solidarity based on a clearer understanding of the cultural conditioning in question. Highlighting thus both a certain degree of liberation of the mind and the enormous difficulty in achieving it, The Emigrants elaborates a torturous, yet crucial stage of cultural decolonization.