Conflicting Models of Agency in Andrea Levy's The Long Song (2010)

• Published in: Cross / Cultures Vol. 182; pp. 413 - 437
• Main Author: Gohrisch, Jana
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Leiden Brill Academic Publishers, Inc 03.01.2015
• Subjects: Abolition of slavery; British Empire; Emancipation of slaves; Essays; Historiography; Multiculturalism & pluralism; Political activism; Postcolonialism; Readers; United Kingdom > UK
• ISSN: 0294-1426

In addition to the last decade of Jamaican plantation slavery challenged by the Baptist War of 1831, its temporal setting covers sixty years of the post-emancipation period: i.e. the time after the abolition of slavery and apprenticeship in the British Empire in 1834/38.8 Further, Levy replaces her predecessors' experiments in narrative fragmentation, polyphony, and pastiche with an aesthetic that favours identification over defamiliarization, action-centred agency over self-reflexivity, and suspense and its gratifying release over inconclusively 'resolved' conflicts. [...]The Long Song is revisionist in two interrelated ways: on the one hand, it contributes to a revisionist historiography that stresses the capacity of enslaved and free blacks to shape their own lives even under adverse conditions. [...]the power of this political intervention is moderated, even tamed, in the novel by opposing concepts of agency as embodied in a mixed-race protagonist and the white plantation owners and slaveholders. [...]the comic and melodramatic elements of the narrative soften the potentially unsettling effect of the novel's treatment of Caribbean slavery and developments after abolition. [...]the text's unusual practice of employing alternating first- and third-person narrators keeps its readers aware of the constructedness of all narratives. [...]my use of the term 'agency' on two levels of abstraction is inspired by Olakunle George's Relocating Agency (2003), in which George claims that African letters, defined as anglophone African literature and criticism, performs agency in its unfolding as an historical phenomenon, "as a discursive practice,"23 rather than in what it says about itself.