scholarly journals African by Exposure: Caregivers, Madness, and the Contagious Other in García Márquez’s Of Love and Other Demons and Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 15
Author(s):  
Meredith Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Sargasso Sea ◽  
Wide Sargasso Sea ◽  
Postcolonial Development ◽  
African Black ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Potential Antidotes

The following article discusses Gabriel García Márquez’s Of Love and Other Demons and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. Specifically, this article will discuss the parallel ways that two novels critique the nature of postcolonial development in the Caribbean, particularly in regard to race and hybridity. Within the novels, the child protagonists and their African/black creole nursemaids follow surprisingly similar plots, though the settings, contexts, and styles of the two texts differ greatly. In these two novels while the white protagonists both die because of their hybrid navigation of their environment, their nurse/mothers survive, largely because of their maintenance of African practices. In many ways, the nurse mothers’ survival and attempts to heal their charges present potential antidotes for the “disease” produced by slavery. The purpose of this paper is to explore those parallel developments in plot, and to look at the ways the two texts disrupt and reinforce colonial hegemonic norms through their depictions of both the nurses and their charges.

On the Veranda: Jean Rhys’s Material Modernism

Jean Rhys ◽  
2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Lou Emery
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Sargasso Sea ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Architectural Form ◽  
Wide Sargasso Sea ◽  
Good Morning ◽  
Material History ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Experimental Prose ◽  
Key Characters

This chapter focuses on the veranda in Rhys’s writing as an architectural space that opens onto multiple stories, its material history embedded within five centuries of imperial conquest and conflict, the slave trade, the Middle Passage, the plantation, and the plantation’s legacies in city spaces of early 20th-century Europe. As a creolized architectural form, the veranda speaks also to global circuits stretching from its origins in West Africa and India through Europe and the Americas, with the Caribbean as a central point of transit. I analyse the veranda in Rhys’s writing – including several of the short stories and the novels Wide Sargasso Sea, Voyage in the Dark, and Good Morning, Midnight – as framing key characters, conflicts, and events within the transcontinental reach of this deep history. The layering of time and space, as built into the veranda, situates also the experimental prose of Rhys’s Caribbean modernism.

“(The Knocking) Has Never Stopped”

2018 ◽  
pp. 163-180
Author(s):  
Andrzej Gąsiorek
Keyword(s):  
Special Interest ◽  
Jean Rhys ◽  
Sargasso Sea ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
Official Discourse ◽  
Wide Sargasso Sea ◽  
The Caribbean

Arguing against critics who situate Jean Rhys in either the modernist or postcolonial camps, this chapter suggests that these movements complement and reinforce one another. In “Again the Antilles” (1927), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Rhys consistently employs ellipsis, narrative fragmentation, and multiple narrators to unmask the ideological underpinnings of plantocratic ideology. Of special interest to Rhys are modernity’s discontinuities, which extend to the rigid binaries of the Caribbean: white and black, master and slave, colonizer and colonized. Unable to fit easily into any of these categories, Rhys’s heroines become “marooned in ruinous subject positions.” Although her work is sometimes read as a form of revisionism that exculpates the colonial class, Rhys not only enables the colonized to speak—most memorably through the character of Christophine in Wide Sargasso Sea—but also exposes the ways in which official discourse ratifies the logic and legacy of colonialism.

The Discourses of Jean Rhys: Resistance, Ambivalence and Creole Indeterminacy

Jean Rhys ◽  
2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Adlai Murdoch
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Jean Rhys ◽  
Caribbean Literature ◽  
Sargasso Sea ◽  
Wide Sargasso Sea ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Complex Patterns ◽  
Social Separation

The complex depths of the creole figure in Caribbean literature and culture continue to demand further exploration, inflected as they are by the long and pervasive presence of colonialism in the region and its attendant corollaries of hierarchical social separation and ethnocultural difference inflected by perceptions of race. In the work of Jean Rhys, the complex patterns and performances of cultural identity that inform her multi-layered and multi-voiced narratives betray a deep-seated ambivalence towards England, the Caribbean, and their varied issues of identity. In her explorations of the various iterations and possibilities of the creole position in Voyage in the Dark and Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys compels us to confront the transactional relationship between colonizer and colonized and the uncharted variations of racial, cultural, and national identity.

scholarly journals Infância, gênero, raça e classe nos romances caribenhos Vasto mar de sargaços e La mulâtresse Solitude / Childhood, Gender, Race and Class in the Caribbean Novels Vasto mar de sargaços and La mulâtresse Solitude

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 101
Author(s):  
Karoline Dos Santos Silva
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Jean Rhys ◽  
White Child ◽  
Sargasso Sea ◽  
French Caribbean ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Wide Sargasso Sea ◽  
Childhood Gender ◽  
The Caribbean

Resumo: O presente artigo tem como objetivo propor uma análise comparativa entre as personagens principais dos romances La mulâtresse Solitude, de André Schwarz-Bart, e Vasto mar de sargaços, de Jean Rhys. O recorte privilegiado neste artigo será o período da infância das duas personagens principais, levando em consideração as temáticas de gênero, raça e classe com a finalidade de comparar o cotidiano e dificuldades de uma criança negra e escravizada com o de uma criança livre e branca. Nossa análise será desenvolvida utilizando referenciais críticos e teóricos dos campos de estudos culturais, literatura e crítica literária, estudos de gênero, história e sociologia. O artigo busca contribuir para a divulgação de obras caribenhas, promovendo uma análise comparativa entre romances do caribe inglês e do caribe francês.Palavras-chave: infância; caribe; raça; classe; gênero.Abstract: This article proposes a comparative analysis between the main characters from the novels La mulâtresse Solitude, by André Schwarz-Bart and Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys. The privileged feature in this article will be the childhood period of the two main characters, taking into account the themes of gender, race and class in order to compare the daily life and difficulties of a black and enslaved child with that of a free and white child. Our analysis will be developed using critical and theoretical references from the fields of cultural studies, literature and literary criticism, gender studies, history and sociology. The article seeks to contribute to the dissemination of Caribbean works by promoting a comparative analysis between English and French Caribbean novels.Keywords: childhood; Caribbean; race; class; gender.

Wide Sargasso Sea’s Archipelagic Provincialism

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Kathleen DeGuzman
Keyword(s):  
Caribbean Literature ◽  
Sargasso Sea ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Wide Sargasso Sea ◽  
The Caribbean

This essay argues for an archipelagic rethinking of Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea, which has long had an uneasy fit into the category of Caribbean literature. It does so by drawing from archipelagic studies and its distinction between islands as discrete, closed-off landmasses and archipelagoes as interconnected, terraqueous topographies. Through close readings, the essay demonstrates how the Caribbean characters in the novel envision localness as an overlap between earthly materialities and contested epistemologies—an attitude the essay defines as “archipelagic provincialism.” The essay ultimately foregrounds archipelagic thinking as a way to recast the often pejorative idea of provincialism as well as offer a methodology for troubling the very idea of canonicity within Caribbean literature.

“Le Revenant”: Baudelaire’s Afterlife in Wide Sargasso Sea

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 665-688
Author(s):  
Juliette Taylor-Batty
Keyword(s):  
Sargasso Sea ◽  
Wide Sargasso Sea

African and Black Diaspora as Curriculum

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Horace R. Hall
Keyword(s):  
African Diaspora ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Involuntary Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Black Diaspora ◽  
African Black ◽  
Racist Ideology ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Colonial Oppression

The African diaspora, also referred to as the African Black diaspora, is the voluntary and involuntary movement of Africans and their descendants to various parts of the world. Even though voluntary widespread African diasporas occurred during precolonizing periods, the Arabic slave trade (7th to 18th centuries) and the transatlantic slave trade (16th to 19th centuries) are largely recognized as phases of involuntary movement with an estimated combined 30 million Africans dispersed across the African continent and globally. Today, the largest populations of people descended from Africans forcibly removed from Africa reside in Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United States, with millions more in other countries. Such vast movement of a people across time and space has meant that those who are part of the African diaspora have suffered similar problems and disadvantages. The legacy of slavery, especially in relation to racism and colonialism, has garnered attention across the scholarly disciplines of history, ethnic, cultural, and religious studies. Likewise, African and Black diasporan responses to colonial oppression have manifested in multiple curricula in literature, music, philosophy, politics, civilization, customs, and so forth, designed for and by African diasporans in their efforts to unite all people of African descent, building on their cultural identity and resisting racist ideology and colonial rule.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document