Beyond Boundaries

Beyond Boundaries: The Intellectual Tradition of Trinidad And Tobago in the Nineteenth Century, written by Selwyn R. Cudjoe, ISBN number 978-1-5589-391-9, was first published in 2003 by Calaloux Productions and printed in the United States of America. The cost of the soft cover book was $250.00 (TTD). There are fifteen chapters within three hundred and ninety-three (393) pages of the book.

The book is aimed at enlightening the reader with regard to the literature of Trinidad and Tobago and its importance in the wider realm of Caribbean literature. This book, scrutinized the literary traditions of the different members of society during the nineteenth century, namely: planter class, the Africans both free as well as slaves. With regard to the coloured people, Cudjoe explored literature that shed light on the different hardships that they faced in the nineteenth century. The author generally starts with pieces of literature that were linked to slavery and its accompanying torment and continued on to the end of the century where the different group made their social and political demands known in society.^[1] The chapters that were outlined for this course were chapters 1 to 6. Throughout these chapters, Cudjoe successfully highlighted issues of racism, gender matters, slavery just to name a few.

In the first chapter, ‘The Menace of Color’ we see the social and economic influence of racism and fear towards people of colour and the different repercussions they faced which prevented them from moving up in society. During the eighteenth and nineteenth century those coloured people were part of many revolts in Caribbean countries notably; Haiti. The narrative of Beyond Boundaries begins with the story of the torture of Louisa Calderon. One of the main characters, Calderon, a mulatto, was the mistress of a Spanish gentleman, of which she allegedly stole money. Later, she was then tortured by Governor Thomas Picton. The Narrative of Louisa Calderon, detailed the elements of torture placed upon her, as seen in the picture one page 14. This incident emphasized that even in a structure in which free coloured people are said to have some level of human rights they were still humiliated by the different groups. Upon realizing that Calderon was a mere fourteen when this happened, invokes the train of thought as to if we could ever purge the violence against women that is ever present in the society. Also, it makes us wonder why there is still streets named after the man who inflicted torture on coloured people. As such, one of the main points of Beyond Boundaries is emphasized on sufficiently in this narrative. In this chapter, Cudjoe successfully caught the reader’s attention in the sense that he made the link between Louisa’s character and Trinidad and Tobago by saying, “Embedded in a transcultural setting and trilingual condition, Calderon heralds the cosmopolitan nature of society…Trinidad and Tobago^[2]” He does, in fact, make it abundantly clear that by this first narrative, we got a glimpse of a modern Trinbagonian subject. Aside from this narrative in this chapter, the author gave a detailed account of the slave, European and colonial background that aided in understanding the complex color hurdles of that society.