Bailey Ludwig
Brandeis University
Historically, English literature, from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Wordsworth, has been used as a tool of colonization and imperialism in Caribbean contexts. As a result, medieval materials have a complex afterlife in contemporary Caribbean texts, art, and literary theory. This paper will focus specifically on the treatment of chivalric masculinity in Claude McKay’s Banana Bottom and Shivanee Ramlochan’s Everyone Knows I am a Haunting. Both texts explore issues of sexual violence and gender performance in colonial/postcolonial contexts while utilizing motifs from medieval romance and hagiography. McKay’s novel embeds medievalism at the heart of imperialism in Jamaica. From the depiction of male predators as mock knights to the omnipresence of the medieval garden, McKay uses medievalism to critique imperialism’s sexual violence and influence on gender roles. Ramlochan’s poetry compilation similarly uses medievalism to examine sexual violence and women’s sexuality in post-colonial contexts. Drawing heavily on medieval hagiography and crusade traditions, Ramlochan critiques traditions of fasting, abstinence, and courtly romantic relationships for their continuing influence in the Caribbean. These texts identify imperial ideologies in medieval traditions, specifically medieval courtly literature’s models of femininity and chivalric masculinity, and provide avenues for thinking about the ongoing influence of the Middle Ages in the present.