关键词: 加勒比裔流散文学, 全球南方, 群岛叙事, 安德烈娅·利维, 《小岛》

Abstract: Caribbean diaspora literature, viewed through a Global South critical lens, faces the dual challenge of recovering suppressed histories while guarding against their subsumption under Global North epistemic frameworks. Andrea Levy’s Small Island employs a polyphonic “archipelagic narrative” to disrupt the insular logic of conventional historiography. By mediating Caribbean-British relations through memories of the Second World War, the novel constructs a “community of catastrophe” and seeks to establish the historical subjectivity and ethical legitimacy of diaspora subjects. However, the “dark skin, white gloves” mode of identity articulated in the novel lacks a sustained decolonized imagination, and its political vision remains constrained by existing regimes of recognition. At its core, the archipelagic narrative operates as a strategic politics of relation: though formally advocating cross-cultural connection, it effectively suspends more fundamental issues, such as racial emancipation and epistemic decolonization, through narratives of individualized class mobility. In this way, the text reveals a broadly significant “recognition paradox” in Global South diaspora writing, whereby efforts to secure recognition from the Other may inadvertently reproduce the very power logic they seek to contest.

Key words: Caribbean diaspora literature, Global South, archipelagic narrative, Andrea Levy, Small Island