The Decolonisation of Literary Culture: the Case of Lizzie and Joe

Abstract

The imperative ‘decolonise!’ has been applied to colonial states, transnational organisations, and major cultural institutions. It has also been applied to marketing, yoga, and pumpkin spice lattes. Its ubiquity, in other words, has threatened to dissipate its conceptual traction and to nullify its political force.

In this exploratory paper, I want to set out from a different premise: that decolonisation is not an isomorphic process that can be applied to various objects and arrangements at different scales but an ensemble of practices that hopes to match and overturn the ensemble of institutions and practices imposed under colonial rule.

For studies of decolonisation in the literary sphere, this means widening the scope beyond how highly valued literary works of colonising cultures have been imposed on colonised peoples—something that has led to a fixation on curricula and canons—to look at all aspects of literary culture that were implanted and cultivated on colonised territory. This encompasses infrastructures of dissemination, consecration and pedagogy and the spectrum of materials from experimental fiction to light verse.

By way of illustration, I want to consider light verse and the case of Lizzie and Joe in the eastern Caribbean: two Creole-speaking characters created by a white Barbadian school master in the late nineteenth century. At first, they typified the established trend of mocking Black Creole speakers. But, over time, Lizzie and Joe went lowkey viral and they were adapted to other contexts and purposes. This includes being reconstituted as hyperreal carnivalesque characters in a Trinidadian satirical newspaper and, decades later, as spokespeople for working-class discontent in the leftist anticolonial Barbados Herald. Lizzie and Joe weren’t ‘decolonised’ by any particular agent, yet in these transformations, I argue, we discern the motions of literary decolonisation.

Bio

Ben Etherington is an Associate Professor in English at Western Sydney University. His teaching and research revolve around literary decolonisation and he’s currently completing a manuscript entitled Creole Poetics: Anglophone Caribbean Vernacular Poetry from Emancipation to Decolonisation. His first book, Literary Primitivism (Stanford, 2018), won the Australian University Heads of English prize for literary scholarship. Ben has produced several audio features including a documentary for ABC Radio National on Gangalidda activist Clarence Walden, co-produced with Alexis Wright, and a six-part series for UTS Impact Studios’ History Lab on the history of Caribbean people in Australia, co-produced with Jamaican novelist Sienna Brown. From July 2026, he will be an Australian Research Council Future Fellow working on a project entitled The Decolonisation of Literary Culture.