Strolling in the Ruins

“Faith Smith’s Strolling in the Ruins seeks to perturb and discompose the pervasive story of Anglophone Caribbean sovereignty, with its familiar rhythms and moments, events and directions, and texts and figures. With an insouciant edge, muted irony, and compelling insight, she invites us to reevaluate some of our most cherished conceits of gendered, sexual, racial, and political citizenship. Above all, Smith is a consummate critic of the will to power of the heroic Caribbean narrative of postcolonial achievement.” - David Scott, Columbia University

“A complex and critically important exploration of Caribbean identity between emancipation and independence, Strolling in the Ruins builds on and transcends contemporary discourse on the centrality of nationalist sovereignty to political life. By taking seriously ordinary people’s commitment to empire and their understanding of their gendered and racialized place within it, Faith Smith brilliantly and innovatively brings the central questions of our political modern into sharp view.” - Deborah A. Thomas, author of Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair

"Against the narrative of heroic sovereignty that has dominated Caribbean literary history, Faith Smith suggests the advantages of slowing down, of caution, of waiting, of strolling. . . . [T]his book strolls, too, eschewing any untoward rush to judgment or conclusion, taking its time, exploring side streets and alleyways, emerging onto the main thoroughfare from unexpected directions. It always makes us look anew, look differently. We could not ask for a better guide." - Peter Hulme, New West Indian Guide