Entre aliénation et émancipation : rompre la spirale de la transmission dans The Same Earth de Kei Miller

Abstract

By situating the plot of his first novel, The Same Earth (2008), in a Jamaican village that seems to be out of time and out of the world, Kei Miller shows a community living in a form of spatial and temporal isolation. As a result, the types of transmission that are at work inevitably lead to a form of social reproduction. Kei Miller's novel also contemplates the notion of transmission as a kind of contamination in the sense that the circulations existing between England, where the main protagonist spends a part of her adult life, and the small village of Watersgate, give rise to fears of a harmful import of uses, particularly in terms of morality, likely to undermine the established order and to break the spiral of the habitus transmission specific to this microcosm. Through Bourdieusian concepts this article examines the modes of transmission at work in Kei Miller's novel and maps out to what extent they participate in the formation of a postcolonial Creole identity defined by discontinuities and ruptures, all the while establishing links between various inheritances.