David Dabydeen's Hogarth: Blacks, Jews, and postcolonial ekphrasis

Eighteenth-century satirical artist William Hogarth figures centrally in Guyanese writer David Dabydeen's ekphrastic postcolonial fiction. In particular, Dabydeen's novels A Harlot's Progress and Johnson's Dictionary invoke plate 2 of Hogarth's 1732 series A Harlot's Progress, which depicts the encounter of a cuckolded Jewish merchant, his mistress, and a turbaned slave boy. In this article, I argue that Dabydeen's strategy of introducing visual intertexts into his fiction encourages a comparative reading of the representational regimes that historically have shaped popular perceptions of blacks and Jews. Situating Dabydeen's Hogarth novels as part of a larger tradition in postwar Caribbean writing of advancing an identificatory reading of Jewishness, I examine how Dabydeen's novels illustrate the need to broaden discussions of the relationship between postcolonial and Jewish studies beyond the question of Holocaust memory.

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