ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how contemporary authors incorporate folklore into their fiction for purposes beyond independence-era calls for Caribbean-centric culture. The demonization of Migraine, a local figure, as opposed to the more obvious White American or European colonizer, serves to undercut dualistic thinking about Caribbean ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders,’ and instead condemns people of all complexions, socio-economic ranks, and nationalities who might fall victim to what Robert Marzec calls “the seductive call of liberal transnational global capitalism”. Zoomorphism on the part of the colonisers has been a powerful tool to degrade the colonised, and a sense of an expanded family of human and nonhuman animals seems to link with claims of “bestiality” of the colonised and with racist discourses. Making Papa Bois dogmatic about his commemoration of non-human life would not only fail to acknowledge this ideological violence enacted upon bodies of color, but risks equating the physical oppression of humans with the oppression of animals.
