This project will investigate changing constructions of national identity in Scottish literary texts dealing with the West Indies, clustering around two key historical/ideological phases: first, Scotland’s active involvement in the exploitation of slaves on West Indian plantations and (the response to) Scottish abolitionist campaigns and the eventual abolition of slavery; and second, the anti-imperial turn of 20th-century Scottish (cultural) nationalism and its distancing from ‘British’/’English’ imperial exploits. The aim of the research is to highlight how literary figurations of Scotland’s relation to the West Indies (represented as an edenic/exotic place or alternatively as an economic asset or, in more recent times, as a problematic/traumatic lieu de mémoire) signal and explicate imperial destabilizations and re-formations of Scottish identity.
