"Women Must Have Spunks": Jean Rhys's West Indian Outcasts

Wilson, Lucy

doi:10.1353/mfs.0.0121

Cited by 51 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 6 publications

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“…The question provoked by Spivak's article-whether the subaltern can ever be heard within the framework of postcolonial and imperial epistemologies-initiated a sequence of scholarly discussions regarding "the nature and limits of the black subaltern's voice and agency," as exemplified by Christophine (Jaising, 2010, p. 831). Scholars such as Lucy Wilson (1986) and Benita Parry (1987) suggest that Christophine is an empowered and resistant black subaltern who voices a "counter-discourse" to imperial accounts (Parry, 1987, p. 38). Most critics, however, tend to complicate the character.…”

Section: Spaces Of Transformation: Caribbean Islands As Creolotopiasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spaces of resistance and transformation: Caribbean islands between dystopia and creolotopia in Wide Sargasso Sea

Su¹,

Huang²

2022

ISJ

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Jean Rhys’s best-known novel Wide Sargasso Sea, writing back to Charlotte Brontë’s classic Jane Eyre, is set in the exuberant natural world of the post-emancipation Caribbean. Despite its harsh depiction of cruelty, self-deception, and hypocrisy in the human world, the novel conveys a sympathetic impression of Caribbean society. The novel’s utopian/dystopian tension is centered on its imagining of the Caribbean as a paradoxical site of coexisting dystopia and creolotopia. This article focuses on spaces lived in by individual characters, aiming to show that Wide Sargasso Sea’s Caribbean islands can be read as both dystopian spaces of resistance and creolotopian spaces of transformation. Counter to colonial utopian imaginary, the tropical islands in the novel are presented as an evil, ugly, and diseased world for both white colonizers and the colonized, yet they are simultaneously portrayed as a special Caribbean creolotopia formed through archipelagic thinking and the process of creolization, as embodied in the lived experiences of the black woman Christophine. By resisting the binarism of victim/victimizer and envisioning utopia and creolotopia in the same space, the novel subverts the binary thinking that dominates Western epistemology.

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Section: Spaces Of Transformation: Caribbean Islands As Creolotopiasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spaces of resistance and transformation: Caribbean islands between dystopia and creolotopia in Wide Sargasso Sea

Su¹,

Huang²

2022

ISJ

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Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark: Community, Race, and Empire

Suh¹

2013

Communal Modernisms

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Representing the Exotic and the Familiar

2019

FILLM Studies in Languages and Literatures

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The multicultural world of today is often said to be marked by a certain kind of exoticization: a “fetishizing process”, as Graham Huggan has called it, which separates a “first world” from a “third world”, the Occident from the Orient. The essays collected here re-assess this tendency, not least by focusing on the kinds of intellectual tourism and dilettantism to which it has given rise. The wider context of these analyses is a postcolonial scenario where literatures and languages can move from the “exotic” to the comparatively “familiar” space of contemporary writings; where an exotic mythos can live on into the familiar present; and where certain perceptions and representations of peoples, of literatures, and of languages have turned exoticization and familiarization into global modes of mass-cultural consumption. Especially by exploring the liminalities between different cultures, this collection manages to trace both the history and the politics of exoticist representation and, in so doing, to make a significant critical intervention.

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"Women Must Have Spunks": Jean Rhys's West Indian Outcasts

Cited by 51 publications

References 6 publications

Spaces of resistance and transformation: Caribbean islands between dystopia and creolotopia in Wide Sargasso Sea

Spaces of resistance and transformation: Caribbean islands between dystopia and creolotopia in Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark: Community, Race, and Empire

Representing the Exotic and the Familiar

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