SOURCE: Patteson, Richard F. “The Fiction of Olive Senior: Traditional Society and the Wider World.” ARIEL 24, no. 1 (January 1993): 13-33.

In the following essay, Patteson regards Senior as a dominant voice in the development of a postcolonial West Indian literature and delineates the defining characteristics of the stories comprising Summer Lightning and The Arrival of the Snake-Woman.

In his foreword to Michel de Certeau's Heterologies, Wlad Godzich points out that in many parts of the world the old colonial order has been supplanted by a “neo-colonialism of center and periphery” in which the “former colonial powers together with other economically dominant nations constitute the core whereas the former colonies form the periphery. The latter admits of measurement in relation to the core as an index of its degree of development, where it is of course implicit that the core's own development is normative and somehow ‘natural’” (xi-xii). Nowhere is...