Abstract
The theme of displacement in Welsh-Guyanese author Charlotte Williams's celebrated autobiography Sugar and Slate (2002) is discussed in the light of the writings of her father, the celebrated Guyanese painter and author Denis Williams. An attempt is made to analyse how Sugar and Slate draws upon travel writing's potential for cultural critique by expressing a politicized voice that articulates postcolonial experiences from Guyana to Sudan to Wales. For Charlotte Williams, the travelling subject engages in various understandings of dwelling and displacement to engender narratives that simultaneously reflect and question a postcolonial politics of global contacts. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which Sugar and Slate removes representations of travel from the dichotomous interplay between home and abroad, and how, in so doing, Charlotte Williams pushes the envelope of Denis Williams's theories of cross-cultural creativity and cultural syncretism. She depicts postcolonial travel not as a 'progress' or an 'arrival' but as a process, a continuous activity of becoming.