ABSTRACT
There are few other places in the world that are as closely associated with the beach as the Caribbean islands. Both in their long history of colonial encounter, cultural trade and naval conquest and in their more recent marketing as paradise resorts of pleasure, these islands figure most prominently in our cultural imaginary as one long, though discontinuous, stretch of beaches – constantly exposing themselves to outside influences while, at the same time, promising protection or intimacy in the natural semicircles of their bays. While the tourist industry’s invention of Caribbean beach life is a relatively new phenomenon, there may be more to such a notion than a simple PR ploy. As Caribbean writers such as Édouard Glissant have argued, the fragmented physiognomy of the archipelago and its coastlines offers a geographical basis for what he calls a ‘poetics of relation’ in which continuous exposure and exchange, rather than containment and absolute delimitation, determine the dynamics in the formation of local societies (see Glissant). In this sense, Caribbean beaches are important operators in the context of a culture of creolisation. At the same time, though, Caribbean beaches turn into sites of concrete work and cultural production – and it is this aspect which concerns me here. Not simply a space of leisure or carefree recreation, the beaches have for centuries exerted a powerful attraction on so-called beachcombers, that is to say, on local collectors and cultural labourers whose work I set out to discuss with reference to some pertinent examples from Caribbean literature. These beach workers offer the particularly localised version of a more general activity that is of special relevance, I shall argue, for the poetics of postcolonial writing and its contested engagements with tradition.
