SOURCE: “The Profit of Language: George Lamming and the Postcolonial Novel,” in Recasting the World: Writing after Colonialism, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, pp. 120-36.

In the following essay, Hulme examines the reworking of Shakespeare's The Tempest in many of Lamming's works.

The colonial situation is a matter of historical record. What I'm saying is that the colonial experience is a live experience in the consciousness of these people. And just because the so-called colonial situation and its institutions may have been transferred into something else, it is a fallacy to think that the human-lived contents of those situations are automatically transferred into something else, too. The experience is a continuing psychic experience that has to be dealt with and will have to be dealt with long after the actual colonial situation formally “ends.”

—George Lamming, in conversation

For political history the event that separates the colonial and the...