Abstract
This article examines Erna Brodber’s 1980 Jamaican experimental novel Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home. In contrast to readings that emphasize the protagonist Nellie Richmond’s journey from psychological fragmentation to wholeness, the essay argues that there is instead a dispersal of Nellie’s identity where no psychic wholeness of the self or the collective happens. Here, Brodber employs a non-linear and polyvocal version of the Bildungsroman genre—a coming of age tale of growth and development from childhood to adulthood. The article explores this literary genre in relation to various regulative frameworks, which recast ‘contexts’ as the perpetual social production, conditioning, transformation and regulation of identity, spectatorship, subjectivity, psychology and behavior. In its exploration of Nellie’s life history within these regulative frameworks, Brodber’s unusual rhizomorphic (or rhizomatic) version of the Bildungsroman exists at the intersection of postcolonial and postmodern narrative forms and critically reworks the category of ‘progress,’ both personal and cultural-historical. More specifically, Nellie’s informal education about her tangled family and community history as well as various formal educational situations in Jamaica and the United States amplify tensions between race and class that help her to denaturalize and critique both. Indeed, she navigates her ambivalent relationship to those terms in relation to both Afro-Caribbean and Euro-American culture. This critique makes her character both idiosyncratic and representational, illustrating that identity, both individual and collective, is fragmented rather than unified.