Caribbean Writers in London: Rhys, James, Marson

Seminar Preparation:
 How (far) do these texts conceptualise and depict racial difference?
 In what ways do categories of race, class and gender intersect in these texts?
 How does Rhys engage with the politics of racial and/or ethnic difference?

Paul Gilroy

1. My concern here is […] with exploring some of the special political problems that arise from the fatal
junction of the concept of nationality with the concept of culture and the affinities and affiliations which
link the blacks of the West to the one of their adoptive, parental cultures: the intellectual heritage of the
West since the Enlightenment. I have become fascinated with how successive generations of black
intellectuals have understood this connection and how they have projected it into their writing and
speaking in pursuit of freedom, citizenship, and social and political autonomy. Gilroy, p. 2.

2. I want […] to look at broader questions of ethnic identity that have contributed to the scholarship and
political strategies that Britain’s black settlers have generated and to the underlying sense of England as a
cohesive cultural community against which their self-conception has so often been defined. Here the ideas
of nation, nationality, national belonging, and nationalism are paramount. They are extensively supported
by a clutch of rhetorical strategies that can be named ‘cultural insiderism’. The essential trademark of
cultural insiderism which also supplies the key to its popularity is an absolute sense of ethnic difference.
[…] forms of cultural insiderism […] typically construct the nation as an ethnically homogenous object
and invoke ethnicity a second time in the hermeneutic procedures deployed to make sense of its distinctive
cultural context. Gilroy. p. 3.

3. a quiet cultural nationalism […] pervades the work of some radical thinkers. This crypto-nationalism
means that they are often disinclined to consider the cross catalytic or transverse dynamics of racial politics
as a significant element in the formation and reproduction of English national identities. Gilroy, p. 4.

4. the urgent obligation to re-evaluate the significance of the modern nation state as a political, economic
and cultural unit. Neither political nor economic structures of domination are still simply coextensive with
national borders. Gilroy, p. 7.

5. The fact that some of the most potent conceptions of Englishness have been constructed by alien
outsiders like Carlyle, Swift, Scott, or Eliot should augment the note of caution sounded here. The most
heroic, subaltern English nationalisms and countercultural patriotisms are perhaps better understood as
having been generated in a complex pattern of antagonistic relationships with the supra-national and
imperial world for which the ideas of ‘race’, nationality, and national culture provide the primary (though
not the only) indices. […] thinking with and through the discourses and the imagery of ‘race’ appears in
the core rather than at the fringes of English political life. pp. 11-12)

6. The themes of nationality, exile, and cultural affiliation accentuate the inescapable fragmentation and
differentiation of the black subject. This fragmentation has recently been compounded further by the
questions of gender, sexuality, and male domination which have been made unavoidable by the struggles
of black women and the voices of black gay men and lesbians. Gilroy, p. 35

7. in the critical thought of the blacks of the West, social self-creation through labour is not the centre-
piece of emancipatory hopes. For the descendants of slaves, work signifies only servitude, misery, and
subordination. p. 40

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Stuart Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’, in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Vultural Studies, ed. by David
Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 442-451.

8. If the black subject and black experience are not stabilized by Nature or by some other essential
guarantee, then it must be the case that they are constructed historically, culturally, politically – and the
concept which refers to this is ‘ethnicity’. The term ethnicity acknowledges the place of history, language
and culture in the construction of subjectivity and identity, as well as the fact that all discourse is placed,
positioned, situated and all knowledge is contextual. […] We are all […] ethnically located and our ethnic
identities are crucial to our subjective sense of who we are. (pp. 447-448)

9. What the new politics of representation does is […] cross the questions of racism irrevocably with
questions of sexuality. […] black radical politics has frequently been stabilized around particular
conceptions of black masculinity, which are only now being put into question by black women and gay
men. […] black politics has also been underpinned by a deep absence or more typically an evasive silence
with reference to class. […] It seems to me that, in the various practices and discourses of black cultural
production, we are beginning to see constructions of just such a new conception of ethnicity: a new cultural
politics which engages rather than suppresses difference and which depends, in part, on the cultural
construction of new ethnic identities. (pp. 447-448)

C.L.R. James

10. James believed that it was through the encounter with the formerly colonial peoples of the Caribbean
that native white Britons were first able to see themselves in their true historical light. […] Implicit in
James’s thinking is the conviction that the West Indians of his generation played an active role not only in
the decolonisation of their home territories in the Caribbean but also, through many displacements, in the
rather less visible process of decolonising metropolitan Britain itself. This in turn (in James’s thought)
raised a further question: what memories of the historical past were required in order to think through the
destruction of the old colonial order?
Bill Schwarz, ‘Crossing the Seas’, in West Indian Intellectuals in Britain, ed. by Bill Schwarz
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 1-30 (pp. 2-3)

11. James’s belief that West Indians ‘are a people more than any other people constructed by history’ may
seem eccentric. But the premise on which it is based is not. Critically, for James, what made the Caribbean
distinctive was not colonialism, but the fact that since the inauguration of the slave plantation West Indians
were, above all else, a modern people. They lived in subjugation. But they experienced modernization – in
the Middle Passage and on the plantation – at its most dynamic, at its highest pitch and at its most brutal.
This, according to James, instilled in Caribbean peoples a distinctive, immediate connection to the
historical past.
Schwarz, p. 5.

12. the masculine imperative. It is still difficult to get past James, and past those formed in his image, to
grasp the plurality of those who have contributed to the full complex of Caribbean thought.
Schwarz, p. 20.

13. he remembered his arriving in England ready to ‘enter the arena where I was to play the role for which
I had prepared myself. The British intellectual was going to Britain’. Even at this early stage, though, this
was an idea of Britishness riven by ambivalence, in which his critique of colonialism was animated by the
language of the colonial civilisation he was attacking. James never lost his regard for the culture of those
whom he always believed to be the imperial oppressors.
Schwarz, p. 5.

14. In these ‘English’ essays a picture of white femininity emerges that clarifies James's reading of Empire:
it is from white female Londoners that James learns an extreme rigour of thought that forces him to analyse
his own form of mystified (dis)enchantment. For it was to these women, ‘immeasurably superior’, that he
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ascribes a considerable ‘independence of mind and judgement’ and a freedom, in both their private and
political lives, from class and race prejudice that forces him to reassess ‘that horrible exclusiveness which
kills so much of our social life in Trinidad’. […] these Desdemonas caused him to reflect on the
disavowals of his recent past, and to expose his own private attitudes to race, class, gender and sexuality as
masquerades.
David Marriott, ‘The Ocular Truth: C.L.R. James’s England’, Critical Quarterly Vol. 57 Issue 3 (October
2015), pp. 35-50.

Una Marson

15. The creative strain between orthodox expectations and radical insights can be regarded as something of
a hallmark of Marson’s creative work and might usefully be read alongside her desire to work through
what it meant to write as a woman and as a Jamaican during a time when tghese identities were both
subject to tremendous pressure and on the cusp of far-reaching transformation. By literally staging the
ways in which the politics of race, class and gender seep into the most intimate of lived realities, Marson’s
plays offered audiences an immediate encounter with the political obstacles she so keenly analysed in her
journalism and the emotional discomforts of colonialism’s legacy that surfaces in her poetry. If reading
these plays by Marson unsettles and provokes us, then her work as a cultural agitator has been successful.
Alison Donnell, ‘Introduction’, in Pocomania and London Calling (Kingston: Blue Banyon Books, 2016),
pp. ix-xxvi) (p. xxv)

16. the writing and production of books by us and about ourselves and our problems is essential.
Una Marson, ‘Wanted: Writers and Publishers’, Public Opinion, 12 June 1937, p. 6

17. Both her creative and her journalistic work testify to her capacity to synthesise the politics of feminism
and the politics of anti-colonialism, translating each into the other.
Alison Donnell, ‘Una Marson: Feminism, anti-colonialism and a forgotten fight for freedom’, in West
Indian Intellectuals in Britain, ed. by Bill Schwarz (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp.
114- 131 (p. 126).

18. Marson was well placed to comprehend British society in ways that James and the other male figures
were not, and […] her observations and interventions, particularly those which focused on the liberation of
women, were both distinctive and combative. […] Marson’s insistence upon gender and race as mutually
affective identity categories was both innovative and intellectually challenging.
Donnell, p. 128.

Jean Rhys

19. The complex, and at times problematic, articulation of racial difference in Rhys’s work makes her
oeuvre a particularly useful place to consider the issues at stake in the conjunction between the
postcolonial and the modernist. Rhys came from a slave-owning family on her mother’s side, and the
legacies of this history – expressions of guilt, fear, romantic primitivism – are prevalent in her work.
Creole Anna Morgan’s desire to be black, and her identification with the suffering of slavery can be read
as at best naïve and at worst neo-imperialist. But, when one examines the contexts and varying
manifestations of such desire through Voyage in the Dark, what emerges is Rhys’s emphasis on the
constructedness or performativity of racial categories, seen just as much in the way Anna is read as black
in London. A key component of her anti-colonialism, and her deconstruction of London’s ‘centrality’, is
her unsettling of the categories of racial and national identification on which colonialism relies. But what
generates this particular focus for Rhys is her constant attention to the intersection of gender and
colonialism (the reason her work is so crucial to this project).
Anna Snaith, Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London, 1890-1945 (Cambridge: CUP,
2014), p. 134.
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20. I would argue […] that the contours of Rhys’s racial politics are markedly different from
contemporaries like Eliot for a number of reasons. Firstly, her Creole position produces an unevenness, or
a constant shifting of racial affiliation, and also a destabilization of the categories of racial difference
themselves. Secondly, her performance of blackness is not merely a response to her position in England
(although it is that in part), but a strategic part of her urgent desire to make visible the West Indies in
London. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Anna desires not just to be black, but to be a black woman
(or she empathizes with black women), so that her feminist articulation of race politics provides a
significant point of departure. Her focus on the reification of the figure of the ‘Englishwoman’, and the
ways in which gendered identity is defined in relation to this figure, is a central concern of her fiction. In
particular, like Olive Schreiner in From Man to Man, her attention to the sale and movement of women’s
bodies foregrounds the links between capitalist imperialism and prostituted women, black and white.
Snaith, pp. 134-5.

21. As the white descendant of slave-owners, coming to England in 1907 at the age of seventeen, and
during the course of her long life returning only once for a visit to her birthplace, should she be considered
a West Indian writer at all? […]It is Rhys’s race that calls her status in doubt, for herself as much as for
others.
Helen Carr, ‘Jean Rhys: West Indian Intellectual’, in West Indian Intellectuals in London, pp. 93-94.

22. in Rhys’s writing while prejudice, cruelty and hypocrisy can be found in both men and women, and in
people of any race, the primary focus of her attack is on English patriarchy. Carr, p. 104.

23. Jean Rhys was never an intellectual in the sense that she published discursive essays or theoretical
books. The language of her fiction and memoirs […] is always the vernacular, and though it is often a
different vernacular from, say, Selvon’s, like him she writes in the voice of the disempowered. Rather than
use, she mocks and exposes the authoritative language of power.
Carr, p. 100.

24. Like the négritude writers, Rhys’s inversion of the usual assumptions of white superiority marked a
significant political statement. European modernist primitivism is often most importantly a sign of the loss
of confidence in Western civilisation, an unsettling, even if not a routing, of nineteenth-century racial
hierarchies. […] Simon Gikandi has argued that one of the characteristics of modernist primitivism is what
he calls its ‘regressive temporality’, in which the primitive is relegated to some former time or to
timelessness itself. Voyage in the Dark, the story of a young white Caribbean woman, still in her teens,
facing the emotional as well as metrological chill of England, does indeed present the modernist trope of
the loss of a warmer, vital past in a devitalised, mechanised modern world, as in many ways the novel is
shaped by the contrast between metropolitan bleakness and Anna’s vivid memories of her Caribbean
childhood. But there is no comforting ‘regressive temporality’: the fact of a shared and disturbing history
which black and white cohabit breaks through the nostalgia.
Carr, p. 108.

25. As Voyage in the Dark breaks modernism apart by refusing to privilege artistic form, it lays the
groundwork for a developing literature of postcoloniality through the many-shaded voice of a Creole
protagonist-narrator. Indeed, the novel’s opening claim that to arrive in London is “almost like being born
again” foretells the defining quality of postcolonial English literature: the advent of the twentieth-century
postcolonial novel would not be a literary genre’s triumphant renaissance, but would be, like the newly
formed nation-states it described, the complicated emergence of a literature inextricably bound to the very
culture it sought to escape. To be Creole is to be born displaced, to label as not-home the land of one’s
birth, and Rhys deploys Anna Morgan’s Creole identity to remake the modernist fascination with fragment
and fracture into the key problematic of postcoloniality. The Creole subject’s multiplicity defies an exact
point of geographical and genealogical origin […] It is precisely this multiplicity— a collocation of
subject- and object-positions that both promises and suspends cultural expressiveness—that makes Voyage
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in the Dark a pivotal text in the transition between the downturn of British experimental modernism and
the crescendo of postcolonial literature. Voyage in the Dark ’s indeterminate beginning, fractured delivery,
and inconclusive ending look back to the techniques that demarcated high modernism from nineteenth-
century realism, but they also look ahead to the historical crises that shape later novels by Chinua Achebe,
V. S. Naipaul, and Salman Rushdie. The intricate geopolitics of Anna Morgan’s narrative mount a far-
reaching challenge to the hegemony of imperial perspectives: the novel’s faint oppositional politics,
despite Anna’s own powerlessness, anticipate the ressentiment that surges through subsequent fictions
about Western imperialism’s various legacies. And as Rhys turns the Empire’s colonizing gaze back on
itself, she unravels the violent cultural epistemologies that give form to so much experimental modernism,
thereby reimagining English fiction along a new—and inevitably transnational—axis.
Urmila Seshagari, ‘Modernist Ashes, Postcolonial Phoenix: Jean Rhys and the Evolution of the English
Novel in the Twentieth Century’, Modernism/Modernity Vol. 13 No. 3 (2006), pp. 487-505 (pp. 488-489)

natasha.periyan@kcl.ac.uk