Binding Properties: Community, language, and rhetoric in George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin

My presentation on George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin will explore the overlap of community, language, and rhetoric within colonial village life in 20th-century Barbados. The paper will examine how the community is bound to one another and to the land through their habits and lifestyles, and how these habits also bind them to the social structures of colonialism, impacting their ability to deal with the incipient change taking place in the village. It will look at how this sense of community contrasts with themes of alienation throughout the novel, particularly through the primary character, G. The paper will also analyze how the villagers view language as a social currency, how the form of the novel affects a similar sense of community through its collage of perspectives, characteristic of the Modernist style, and how language informs the differing attitudes towards education. Finally, the paper explores the rhetoric of both the colonizers and villagers, its societal effects, and how this ultimately shapes how the villagers come to an understanding of their world and their processes of meaning-making.