Mine the Ruins

This review essay explores the extent to which the phenomenon of imperial “neglect” proposed in Christopher Taylor’s Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism (2018) maintains saliency in the wake of national independence throughout the British Caribbean. Through a reading of Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, the essay highlights how the market logics of mid-nineteenth-century imperial liberalization continued to animate new forms of West Indian erasure well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While Kincaid deploys arguments of imperial neglect, she refuses the aspirations for repair that neglect implies. By stressing the impossibility of repairing the violence of British colonial rule, her work instead asks, What new forms of thought become possible beyond argumentative frames of repair?