ABSTRACT
As a processual concept, the Caribbean-Atlantic imaginary is recovered in its most intense realization in Lewis’ poem The Isle of Devils.1 Fugitive slave and outlaw of the sea lanes, that poem’s Demon-king personifi es and exercises the agency of masculine counterorders that threatens the instituted order of colonial society with a revolutionizing vision of dread and terror, and animates Lewis’ imagination with its stark occult power. Hero and role model of the slaves’ desire, demonic image of the slavocrats’ darkest fears, this rebel outlaw fi gures social and political agencies that are foreshadowed in key Afro-Atlantic males valorized in the preceding chapter. Opportunistically positioning himself at a strategic point in the Atlantic, the Demon-king shares with John Canoe and the black pilot the identity of a slave constituted as an oceanic subject. Like both of them, he suggests the possibilities oceanic marronage afforded such slaves to achieve personal autonomy and even to subvert plantation order. In a further linkage, the aspiration they symbolize performatively he enacts explicitly: in his design to translate private dream into revolutionary social action by the way he combines the magic and occult powers of myal and obeah to plot the demise of white plantation power.
