Negotiating personhood in postcolonial trinidad reading public spaces in select novels of earl lovelace

Abstract

Earl Lovelace is a Trinidadian novelist whose works capture the struggles of individuals and communities as they navigate displacement, marginalisation, and self-reclamation in postcolonial Trinidad. This research explores how the quest for identity or personhood (as he prefers to call it) is not an isolated process, but takes place between the self and the society in the realm of space where it gets incessantly modified. This research particularly focuses on public newlinespaces or spaces of public nature that are accessible to the public and allows for social interaction. The novels selected for the study are The Schoolmaster (1965), While Gods are Falling (1968), The Dragon Can t Dance (1979), Salt (1996) and Is Just a Movie (2011). Lovelace has structured these novels to navigate across time (1930s to 1970s Trinidad) and space (rural to suburban newlineto urban), representative of the spatio-historical transition in postcolonial newlineTrinidad. Through textual analysis, the research traces this transition and explores the implicated lives of the place, its people, and their struggles for self-recovery. The research falls within the field of postcolonial spatiality, recognising the need to explore the mutually implicated temporal and spatial frames in the reading of postcolonial experiences. It offers scope for further research on how postcolonial spaces within and beyond the region are continually contested and redefined alongside people s identity negotiations.