V. S. Naipaul: A Materialist Reading

In the spring of 1978 I gave a lecture at Columbia University, New York, to primarily West Indian students, on the manner in which resistance fashioned Caribbean literature. One of the students asked how V. S. Naipaul's work fitted into that pattern. I answered that although the work of some novelists may have been fashioned by the positive dimensions of that tradition (for example, George Lamming), others, such as V. S. Naipaul, had responded to its negative aspects. A fellow panelist commented that Naipaul was "just reactionary." This remark sent me in search of a fuller account of his work, convinced that a writer as important as V. S. Naipaul (even though he was not as well known in the United States then as he is today) could not be discarded by such a simplistic statement. Reactionary he might be, but in that very reaction he had raised many important concerns that serious scholars have to address (From Introduction)