What it means to stay: reterritorialising the black Atlantic in Erna Brodber's writing of the local

The emphasis on migratory subjectities within postcolonial studies has come from many, directions-Bhabha, Gilroy, Appadurai, Boyce Davies-and their convergence has created a critical practice in which diaspora studies takes centre stage. More specifically the way in which the Caribbean person is given emblematic status as the metropolitan migrant is made clear ill James Clifford's declaration that 'We are all Caribbeans now...in our urban archipelagos'. This paper examines the serious impact on the critical reception of Caribbean writings that has been made as a result of the fact that metropolitan diasporas tire now the privileged places in which to be properly 'postcolonial'. It is my aim to show how Erna Brodbers cullurally specific studies haw enormous value in the face of the more general and flattened enunciations of diaspora and creolisation which are being circulated at a theorelical level. I shall look at two fairly recent pieces of writing by Brodber: a pamphlet entitled 'The people of my Jamaican village (1817- 1948)' and an essay, entitled 'Where tire all the others?' in the book Caribbean Creolisation.