Rum Histories: Drinking in Atlantic Literature and Culture

The book examines rum in anglophone Atlantic literature between 1945 and 1973, the period of decolonization, and explains the adaptation of these images for the era of globalization. Rum’s alcoholic nature links it to stereotypes (e.g., piracy, demon rum, Caribbean tourism) that have constrained serious analysis in the field of colonial commodities. Insights from anthropology, history, and commodity theory yield new understandings of rum’s role in containing the paradox of a postcolonial world still riddled with the legacies of colonialism. The association of rum with slavery causes slippage between its specific role in economic exploitation and moral attitudes about the consequences of drinking. These attitudes mask history that enables continued sexual, environmental, and political exploitation of Caribbean people and spaces. Gendered and racialized drinking taboos transfer blame to individuals and cultures rather than international structures, as seen in examinations of works by V. S. Naipaul, Hunter S. Thompson, Jean Rhys, and Sylvia Townsend Warner. More broadly, these stereotypes and taboos threaten understanding West Indian nationalism in works by Earl Lovelace, George Lamming, and Sylvia Wynter. The conclusion articulates the popular force of rum’s image by addressing the relationship between a meme from the "Pirates of the Caribbean" films and rhetoric during the 2016 election year.

GENDERED URBAN SPACES AND STRANGENESS IN JEAN RHYS’ GOOD MORNING, MIDNIGHT (1939)

This article analyses Jean Rhys’ 1939 novel Good Morning, Midnight from the standpoint of spatial and gender theory. Firstly, it explores the portrayal of gendered spaces in the modern city. In order to do so, it examines how Sasha Jensen challenges spatial constraints but is then identified as a stranger to the social order. Secondly, a parallelism between the urban automatisation of production and the female body is established to explore how consumer culture affects Sasha. Finally, it examines how the influence that Sasha’s fractured subjectivity has on her social encounters, which situate her on a liminal space.

Caryl Phillips’s Rewriting of the Canonical Romance as a Genre

The paper considers Phillips’s rewriting of the canonical nineteenth-century romances in three of his novels – A State of Independence (1986), The Lost Child (2015), and A View of the Empire at Sunset (2018). The three texts resettle the romance genre through the postcolonial concept of ‘home’. In A State of Independence, Phillips rearranges the role of one of Jane Austen’s most orthodox characters, the landowner Sir Thomas Bertram of Mansfield Park (1814), by transposing the Austenian character’s features to his protagonist Bertram Francis, a Caribbean man who comes back to his ancestral homeland after twenty years in Britain. In The Lost Child, chronicling literary-historical events in the present tense by transferring the life of the Brontë family into the protagonists of Wuthering Heights (1847) is for the author one way of calling into question the real sense of literature. It is for this reason that Phillips constructs a cyclic narration around the figure of Branwell Brontë, fictionalised by his sister Emily in the romance protagonist Heathcliff, and mirrored in The Lost Child in the character of Tommy Wilson. In A View of the Empire at Sunset, Phillips definitely overturns the colonial and genre categories by reassessing the in-between life of the Dominican-born writer Jean Rhys through her personal return journey to Dominica: as a result, the author of Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) (an intense rewriting of Jane Eyre) becomes a fictional character, and the literary events of her life sum up the vicissitudes both of the two ‘Bertrams’ – of Mansfield Park and A State of Independence – and the protagonists of Wuthering Heights and The Lost Child.

Intertextualidad: literatura y cine

El presente artículo trata de algunos usos de la intertextualidad entre el cine y la literatura. I Walked with a Zombie (1943) es la segunda de las nueve películas producidas por Val Lewton que dieron forma al género de terror y tuvieron una influencia duradera en el lenguaje cinematográfico. La película, que replantea la clásica novela victoriana Jane Eyre en un escenario caribeño, esboza las fallas del proceso colonizador europeo mucho antes de la llegada de los estudios postcoloniales. La novela parcialmente autobiográfica de Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), reformula Jane Eyre desde una perspectiva feminista y poscolonial por medio del punto de vista de «la loca del ático». En la novela El beso de la mujer araña (de Manuel Puig), el cine y las películas, incluida I Walked with a Zombie, constituyen el medio intertextual para la creación del personaje literario y la figura de un amor que no tiene nombre.

Wide Sargasso Sea e as cartas de Jean Rhys: dessacralizando o discurso colonial

O objetivo deste trabalho é analisar quão contextual é o processo de escrita de mulheres, em especial, o do texto literário, tomando como objeto as cartas de registro da produção do romance feminista pós-colonial Wide Sargasso Sea, da escritora Jean Rhys. Por meio das cartas de Rhys, abordamos os fatores que envolveram a produção da obra, desde o conflito da autora diante da representação da personagem crioula louca no romance inglês, Jane Eyre (1847), da escritora canônica Charlotte Brontë, às estratégias para validação da sua obra na Inglaterra. Tomamos como referência perspectivas pós e decoloniais para análise dos aspectos elencados nas cartas e suscitados pelo texto literário.

Diversity of Genre in Post-Colonial Literature

The main aim of this article is to outline main tendencies in the development of post-colonial literature in the face of Jean Rhys and her novel Wide Sargasso Sea as a vivid example of starting attempt to break a white-domineering view of Asian countries and build up a new identity. Research attempts to refer to a wider scope of literary texts, including the ones that outline issues and problems related to the so-called invasion narratives. The term invasion narratives is seen as referring to a number of different texts, including English Patient by Michael Ondaatje or the Reader by Bernhard Schlink. One of numerous possibilities of analyzing post-colonial literature is the analysis of the novels by Zadie Smith White Teeth and on Beauty, the latter being a good example of a return to realism and actualizing what is called coined as the meanwhile. Special attention is given to meta-modernism and its function on the contemporary cultural and literary scene, above all with its attempt to start a neo-romantic direct kind of prose, or verse, simple in its form, yet aiming to construct new identities. This kind of prose incorporates the narratives exploring different traumas, including trans-generational traumas.

El poder de los cuerpos: el desarrollo de la sexualidad y la práctica del aborto en Del rojo de su sombra de Mayra Montero, Wide sargasso sea de Jean Rhys y Moi, Tituba, sorcière… Noire de Salem de Marysé Condé. Un estudio comparado.

En este trabajo se analizan las manifestaciones de la sexualidad y la práctica del aborto como elementos de subversión respecto al sistema opresivo colonial y patriarcal que constriñe la libertad de las mujeres protagonistas en tres textos literarios producidos por escritoras caribeñas: Del rojo de su sombra (1992) de Mayra Montero, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) de Jean Rhys y Moi, Tituba sorcière… Noire de Salem (1986) de Marysé Condé. Los procesos de reescritura que dieron lugar a los textos revelan voces soslayadas por la historia y la literatura a partir del distanciamiento con los modelos femeninos imperantes y la (re)valorización del descubrimiento del cuerpo, las experiencias sexuales y sus prácticas.

I Walked with a Zombie: Colonialismo e intertextualidad

Este artículo trata de algunos usos de la intertextualidad entre el cine y la literatura. I Walked with a Zombie (1943) es la segunda de las nueve películas producidas por Val Lewton que dieron forma al género de terror y tuvieron una influencia duradera en el lenguaje cinematográfico. La película, que replantea la clásica novela victoriana Jane Eyre en un escenario caribeño, esboza las fallas de la empresa colonial europea mucho antes de la llegada de los estudios postcoloniales. La novela parcialmente autobiográfica de Jean Rhys, Ancho mar de los Sargazos (1966), reescribe Jane Eyre desde una perspectiva feminista y poscolonial, desde el punto de vista de «la loca del ático». En la novela de Manuel Puig El beso de la mujer araña, el cine y las películas, incluida I Walked with a Zombie, son el medio intertextual para la creación del personaje literario y la figura de un amor que no tiene nombre.