“Collective Human Substance”: Power and Community in George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin

Abstract

George Lamming’s novel In the Castle of My Skin establishes a major theme of both Lamming’s writing and his politics: a conflict between what power people possess, especially in their labor, and the circumstances of subjection in which they live. Up to now, scholars have taken a rather melancholy view of the novel’s characters’ capacities, even describing them as “sterile” and “unreflective.” Through a careful reading of Castle, attention to Lamming’s comments in later interviews and lectures, and especially reference to the archive of Lamming’s papers at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, this essay argues for a new interpretation of collective power in the novel.