Jean Rhys Conference Paper Notes and Partial Bibliography: Transnational
Culture, Caribbean, Creole and Creolization
“Geography is fate”
-Heraclitus
Author Profile:
Jean Rhys (1890-1979)
*Born in Roseau, Capital of Dominica. Dominica is an island
nation in the lesser Antilles, near Guadeloupe and Martinique .
*Dominica
is known for its unspoiled natural beauty.
*Rhys’ father was a Welsh Doctor, and her mother was a
third-generation Dominican Creole of Scots ancestry.
*Dominica comes from the Latin word for Sunday, which is the
day Columbus spotted the island.
*Dominica was originally inhabited by Island Caribs or Kalinango.
*Place of major importation of African slaves. France had
longest influence before losing the island to the British after losing the Seven Years’ War
(1754-1763, main conflict was 56-63). Afterward, the island became a British
colony, though legislation mainly regarded to the white British subjects (?).
Rhys moved to Britain in 1910, when she was 16.
*Antillean
Creole French is still spoke in some parts today.
THE WORLDING OF JEAN RHYS
*Greenwood Press,
Contributions to the Study of World Literature, 1999)
*Sue Thomas (1955-)
Pg. 1)
Rhys sent to England in 1907, her accent needed
to be “overcome” for her to be an actor, according to the Academy of Dramatic
Art in London. She remained an expat from 16 on, “apart from one short return
to Dominica.”
Her Creole mother Minna was from the formerly
slave-owning Lockhart family, holders of the Geneva estate, described as “decayed.”
Rhys, Letters,
pg. 172, 1959 letter to Francis Wyndham: “As far as I know I am white—but I
have no country really now.” (Compare
this Henry James roughly 60 years before, so wrapped up in nationalism and “national”
legacy and elitism and eugenics and other ridiculous ways of biological racism,
wanting desperately to be British/European in every way in order to be part of
the elite and brutally racist club)
Helen Carr, Jean
Rhys, xiv, quoted on pg. 1 of Thomas, [“homelessness is the terrain of Rhys’s
fiction,” “dealing as it does with those
who belong nowhere, between cultures, between histories.”
Links
The Paris Review
article: http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/author/cpantazi/
LA Times Article: http://articles.latimes.com/2009/jun/28/entertainment/ca-jean-rhys28
Working Bibliography
Definitions:
Andras, Carmen.
“The Poetics and Politics of Travel: an
Overview.”
Bhabha, Homi K.
The Location of Culture
Gilroy, Paul.
The Black Atlantic: Modernity and
Double Consciousness.
Rich, Adriane.
-“Notes
Toward a Politics of Location.”
**Clifford, James
(historian at UCSC)
-“Notes on Theory and Travel.”
*Published in Inscriptions (1989). http://culturalstudies.ucsc.edu/PUBS/Inscriptions/vol_5/clifford.html
-“Travelling
Cultures.”
*
Published in Lawrence Grossberg et al Cultural
Studies (1992)
-Traveling Theories, Traveling Theorists. Inscriptions
Journal (no longer in print).
Jay, Paul.
“Border Studies: Re-mapping the
Humanities.” http://www.prairie.org/resources/detours/border-studies-re-mapping-humanities
Spivak, Gayatri.
“Three Women's Texts and a
Critique of Imperialism” [worlding, Jean Rhys]
Link
to text at UPenn: http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Articles/spivak.html
NOTES ON SPIVAK,
WORLDING, AND RHYS
http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Articles/spivak.html [Spivak’s article from critical inquiry,
where she talks about Rhys’ and two other women writers]
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