In the Castle of My Skin Essay | Critical Essay #1

In the Castle of My Skin Critical Essay #1

Barnhisel teaches writing and directs the Writing Center at the University of Southern California. In this essay, Barnhisel describes how Lamming's novel provides a model for a Marxist analysis of the advance of market capitalism in a small rural community.

In the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the credibility of Marxism as a legitimate political program almost disappeared in the West. However, especially in the developing world, the ideas of Marxism have survived as a very compelling and powerful explanatory mechanism for answering the questions of why poverty and oppression and political corruption are so persistent in "Third World" societies. To many thinkers of the developing world, and many Western scholars sympathetic to their struggles, the "triumph of the Free World" is a misnomer, a euphemism constructed to put the best face on the real winner of the Cold War: large-scale corporate capitalism. What is termed...
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