The Divided English Plantation and Beyond:Jan Shinebourne's Timepiece and The Last English Plantation

Contextualized in the collective history of Chinese immigration to the British West Indies,Guyanese Chinese writer Jan Shinebourne represents the creolized Chinese culture and experiences in Guiana.Her Timepiece(1986)and The Last English Plantation(1988)situate interethnic relationships at their center and gives literary testimonies to the race riots between IndoGuyanese and Afro-Guyanese in the 1950 s and 1960 s.Her literary documentation of Guyanese history repudiates historical pessimism and Eurocentric historical viewpoint,and thus conveys a political immediacy and urgency which resists British colonialism that engenders the racial and social divisions in Guiana and enables the deterritorialization of Chinese diasporic discourse and other minority discourses.