Here we begin to see what James seeks to do by muting Marley's voice. It is as though in intentionally silencing one of the world's most vocal icons, the novel also intentionally sidelines the politics of nationalist and pan-Africanist racial liberation he came to embody. Such intentional and ironic circumspection, along with the novel's poly-vocal structure, eschews thematic and character organization around an ideal narrative subject who embodies the nation's identity or culture, complicating our expectations of a Caribbean novel's hero and foregrounding instead a consideration of where power actually resides in such covertly embattled national milieus.
A little less abstractly, the character Josey Wales, whom we can think of as a The Singer's foil, is described in the "Cast of Characters" in three different ways: "head enforcer, don of Copenhagen City, 1979-1991, leader of the Storm posse." Each of these descriptors emphasizes Josey's relation to a specific source of power, which moves from local to global as history and neoliberal order progress. "Head enforcer" and "don" reflect a relation to local government politics in Jamaica in the 1960s and 70s. Josey's covert interaction with the CIA in the late 70s, a link made possible by his history as an enforcer for local politicians, leads to trafficking in illicit commodities in the eighties and nineties, which in turn enables his later transition to international posse leader. Josey pretends to be on the local politician's leash in the 70s because it covers his dealings with the CIA, which in turn cover his connections to Medellin. Throughout his dealings with Americans in particular, Josey crucially postures as ignorant and unsophisticated, hiding behind stereotypes in order to disguise how savvy and dangerous he is. When he meets Louis Johnson, the CIA field officer that contracts his services to assassinate The Singer, he tells the reader,
By playing fool fi ketch wise, as we say in Jamaica, the novel's anti-hero hides his dealings with Columbian drug traffickers from local politicians and the CIA, revealing himself to the reader as far more sophisticated than anyone, perhaps even the reader herself, imagines. Josey's manipulation of those who assume his ignorance and dependence because of his race and nationality, as well as his literal movement throughout the novel, allow us to see his illegal activities as parallels for capitalist enterprises more generally in the way they traverse the world in covert and unregulated ways. The novel also stresses the relationship between the United States' recently declassified involvement in Operation Condor's destabilizing efforts throughout the region during the Cold War and the illegal trafficking of narcotics. In stressing these connections, A Brief History issues a renewed invitation to examine the simultaneity of neoliberal policy-making, government destabilization, and the boom in weapons and narcotics trafficking in Latin American during the 1970s.
The few points I have raised here barely brush the surface of the complexity and importance of this groundbreaking novel. I cannot even begin, in this short essay, to talk about the novel's roman à clef dimensions - Josey Wales and the Storm Posse are stand-ins for Lester "Jim Brown" Coke (Christopher "Dudus" Coke's father) and the Shower Posse for example - and what they in turn mean for a literary discourse that perpetually mines the past to make sense of the present. What I hope I have demonstrated is how a contemporary cohort - the successors and not simply the unselfconscious inheritors of Selvon, Lamming, Brathwaite, and Walcott- with James at their head is redefining the political stakes of the Anglophone novel, from their own metropolitan positions, by troubling the traditional frames through which the novel positions nation as the source of independence, particularly for developing nations and their citizens.
This redefinition becomes necessary because the prioritization of identity in reading and writing national, diasporic, immigrant, and other literatures of difference decouples national identity from material conditions in a manner that both enables and represents neoliberalism's inequalities. James' "poetics of excess" intervenes in this decoupling tendency by displacing the centrality of discrete nationalism in Caribbean narratives and creating wild and risky new possibilities for thinking about the region's place in our contemporary reality. As the award of The Booker Prize indicates, A Brief History's literary appeal transcends the prescriptions of Anglophone Caribbean fiction. It also means more publishing opportunities for Caribbean authors and a much wider audience for Caribbean fiction. A Brief History blazes an instructive trail that dares both readers and writers to think beyond the tradition of oppositional literature inaugurated in earlier decades in order to illuminate the forces of constraint in the present, rather than reprimanding contemporary writers for not measuring up to the proprieties of the past.
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