Summary “The Material Imperialism of the Home” in Paule Marshall’s The Chosen Place, The Timeless People argues that in the fictional Caribbean country Bourne Island, where this novel about post-World War II development is set, home is understood as a conflicted site of technological and material structures left over from slavery and colonialism. It further focuses on the novel’s narration of how global transformations in the economy and the development of new technological ideologies that were connected to histories of slavery and processes of racialisation emerged not just in imperial centres, but also in the quotidian places of the Caribbean home. The first part of the article considers the different ways that the “Timeless People” and protagonist Merle Kinbona experience home as an entanglement with the colonial and slave past, and how this condition affects their potential futures. The second half of the article looks at the novel’s treatment of cybernetic and information technologies through the character of white anthropologist Allen Fuso and how his efforts to resist becoming a United States-based domestic, heteronormative, “IBM Machine” are related to histories of racial oppression, technology, imperialism, and new forms of value extraction.

中文翻译：

---

保尔·马歇尔（Paule Marshall）的《选定的地方，永恒的人》中的家庭物质帝国主义

摘要 Paule Marshall 的 The Chosen Place, The Timeless People 中的“The Material Imperialism” 认为在虚构的加勒比海国家伯恩岛（这部关于二战后发展的小说的背景）中，家被理解为一个冲突的地方奴隶制和殖民主义遗留下来的技术和物质结构。它还进一步侧重于小说的叙述，即经济的全球转型以及与奴隶制历史和种族化进程相关的新技术意识形态的发展，不仅出现在帝国中心，而且还出现在加勒比家庭的日常生活中。文章的第一部分考虑了“永恒的人”和主角梅尔·金博纳（Merle Kinbona）在与殖民和奴隶过去的纠缠中体验家的不同方式，以及这种情况如何影响他们潜在的未来。文章的后半部分通过白人人类学家艾伦·福索（Allen Fuso）的性格来看待小说对控制论和信息技术的处理，以及他为抵制成为美国本土的异性恋“IBM 机器”而做出的努力如何与种族历史相关。压迫、技术、帝国主义和价值提取的新形式。