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The novel was an imported form. For the metropolitan writer it was only one aspect of self-knowledge. About it was a mass of other learning, other imaginative forms, other disciplines. For me, in the beginning, it was my all. V.S. Naipaul, 'Reading and Writing' (1998) 2 'FORM,' WE ARE TOLD, is an abstraction, a 'mischievous' concept. 3 'Formalism'-the practice of reading and critical discourse that 'form' spawns-registers as much a 'desire for form' as an identification or analysis thereof. 4 It says as much about the investments (or fetishes) of the reader as about the text in which she locates formal work, or beauty, or accomplishment. To the literary historian, 'form' becomes operative at moments when the discourse of formalism feeds into the self-understanding, and eventually the practice, of writers themselves. One such moment-in this case, a rather extended one-encompassed those mid-to late-twentieth-century writers and critics born into restive British colonies, or during the first years of independence. For many writers of the decolonizing world, and for the theorists of 'postcolonialism' who followed them, 'form' took on historical and spatial concreteness. It is often now posited that 'formalism' might be applied to these colonial, antior postcolonial texts, but it is not generally suggested that questions of form and formalism helped define the emergence of 'postcolonialism' as a mode of critique. I contend, in what follows, that they did.

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This chapter is about historical writing in the West Indies, from the 1960s onwards. Historical writing about the colonial past was a key place in which Caribbean writers in this era analysed the social and cultural impact of that history and looked forward to a decolonized future. Naipaul’s Loss of El Dorado is a fascinating but neglected text in this conversation, and is a key text in the development of his historical and social thought. This chapter positions Naipaul’s work within a history of West Indian historical writing, and historiographical debate, looking in detail at the work of C.L.R. James, Elsa Goveia, Eric Williams, Derek Walcott, and David Scott.