Violent Ventriloquism

Abstract

The chapter focuses on the relationship between violence, both physical and rhetorical, and the emergence of dialect literature in the nineteenth-century post-Emancipation anglophone Caribbean. It focuses on racial ventriloquism, the use of so-called black voices by white authors to advocate violent retribution against black populations. The chapter uses as case studies Jamaica during the period of the Morant Bay Rebellion and British Guiana after the arrival of Indian indentured laborers and other large-scale migrations. White creole authors like British Guiana’s Michael McTurk, or “Quow,” are discussed. The chapter also examines rebuttals by black and brown people to white ventriloquist dialect in newspapers published by men of color.