Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Caribbean Literary Field: Crossing Boundaries in Erna Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home

In his 1996 article ―Enduring Substances, Trying Theories‖, Sidney Mintz returned to a theme that has been central to his work on the Caribbean, that of the region‘s fundamental and historically specific modernity. Discussing the rise of the plantation system from the sixteenth century onwards and the importation of enslaved and indentured labour, he observes as follows: The enterprises for which these people were carried across oceans were intimately associated with Europe and its growth. Their development was an instance of precocious modernity, an unanticipated (indeed unnoticed) modernity — unnoticed especially, perhaps, because it was happening to people most of whom were forcibly stolen from the worlds outside the West. No one imagined that such people would become ―modern‖ — since there was no such thing; no one recognised that the raw, outpost societies into which such people were thrust might become the first of their kind. (1996, 298) Underlying this ―precocious modernity‖ was the complex agro-industrial character of the plantation, its unity of field and factory and the application of technical features in