Candace Ward's Crossing the Line: Early Creole Novels and Anglophone Caribbean Culture in the Age of Emancipation plumbs the discursive performances of history, facticity, and racial politics offered by early nineteenth-century Creole novelists. Anchored in the study of four novels – the anonymously published Montgomery; Or, the West Indian Adventurer (1812–13), Hamel, the Obeah Man (1827), and Marly; Or, A Planter's Life in Jamaica (1828), and E. L. Joseph's Warner Arundell: The Adventures of a Creole (1838) – Ward argues that these texts attempt to speak back to metropolitan understandings of Creole culture as irredeemably consumed by profit and power, and by physical and sexual violence against the enslaved. Creole novelists instead grounded their portrayals of Caribbean life in “empirical, experiential knowledge” that trafficked in complex, if still sentimental, portraits of plantocratic daily life (2). To that end, Caribbean writers frequently noted that they had experienced or witnessed the Caribbean in ways members of the metropole had not. As Ward explores, however, this recourse to empiricism often illuminated the “shifting and unstable terms that shaped imperial ambitions and increasingly globalized economies over the course of the eighteenth century,” terms archived in the fluid dynamics of power, agency, temporality, and history reflected by characters and plots in these novels (3). As a marker of empirical epistemological practices, furthermore, Ward points out that early Creole novels “performed their reproductive work on the same discursive stage as that occupied by abolitionist writers,” who also made much of a language of experiential testimony (23). In this way, Creole writings trouble the “teleological implications” imbedded within the novel's generic defense of authenticity and epistemological authority.

In what I think may be one of Ward's most compelling readings, she considers Hamel, the Obeah Man as centrally concerned with progressive notions of history, particularly in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution. The novel follows Hamel, the titular practitioner of obeah, who with other black insurrectionaries plans a slave rebellion in Jamaica, and the efforts of Fairfax, a dispossessed plantation owner, to impede their plot and reclaim his land. Although the text is sympathetic to white slave-owners, it offers a nuanced, if ultimately ambiguous, portrait of Hamel, whose last-minute about-face against the insurrectionists and timely assistance to Fairfax “is constructed as both a threat to and savior of white creole time” (60). Ward contends that Hamel represents an Africanist presence in the novel that resists contemporaneous European efforts to relegate African culture to a past outside Hegelian notions of universal history. Hamel, in other words, “disrupts history's flow in his attempt to effect a ‘permanent revolution’ on the island,” yet his renunciation of his revolutionary aims “ensur[es] a restoration of plantocratic rule” (60). Crossing the Line’s interventions, therefore, are many, and it remains a provocative monograph for those working in genre studies and the novel, Caribbean literature and culture, and theories of temporality, history, and revolutionary time.