Kitch: A Fictional Biography of a Calypso Icon
- Submitting institution
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De Montfort University
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 27030
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
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-
- Publisher
- Peepal Tree Press
- ISBN
- 9781845234195
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2018
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- 'Kitch' is the first biography of the Trinidadian calypso icon and 'Empire Windrush' passenger, Aldwyn Roberts, Lord Kitchener (1922-2000). As a ‘fictional’ biography however, Kitch occupies a deliberately interstitial position. Like Michael Ondaatje’s 1976 novel, 'Coming Through Slaughter', a fictionalised account of the life of the pioneering jazz cornetist Buddy Bolden, 'Kitch' utilises a series of discontinuous and dislocated voicings alongside a range of ancillary devices such as newspaper clippings, historical documents and interviews. Like 'Slaughter', 'Kitch' is an experiment in literary collage which challenges ideas of authenticity in biographical writing.
In the iconic Pathé footage of the Windrush’s arrival, Lord Kitchener and the other passengers occupy a liminal threshold– not yet in Britain but no longer in the Caribbean. Like Legba at the crossroads, suggesting both horizontal migratory movement to the metropolis, and the vertical reten-tion of ancestral memory through time, Kitchener, in his own symbolic role as griot, was able to enter the colonial centre, and return, in the mid 1960s, to the postcolonial sphere of newly independent Trinidad.
As a Caribbean author, I have a political investment in the polyvocal, democratic structure of 'Kitch'. In the text, the testimonies of characters, fictitious or otherwise, contribute non-hierarchically to the narrative and offer an alternative to the western biography’s traditional focus on the life of a single, celebrated character. In 'Kitch', Lord Kitchener himself, is de-centred and provides no first person commentary. His story is witnessed, and carried, by a community of voices. This community, which reflects and constructs Kitchener, also reveals themselves in the telling. The reader is therefore offered a glimpse of the sociopolitical and cultural background to Kitchener’s life and milieu. It is, in this liminal space, at the interstice of fiction and biography, at the point where com-munity and individual meet, that Lord Kitchener emerges.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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