Jean Rhys’s Racial Disorientation: “The Imperial Road” and the Question of Racial Identification in the 1970s
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“The Imperial Road” is Jean Rhys’s unfinished manuscript, rejected by publishers for its openly racist tone. Although it describes Rhys’s actual visit to Dominica in 1936, it is not a transparent recollection of the travel but a recreation informed by racial dynamics of the 1970s when she wrote the text. This paper examines the manuscript as a troubled (and troubling) response to what Rhys perceived as racial rejection from Dominica at the wake of political independence. Rhys’s representation of white Creole womanhood significantly depends on an interwoven configuration of racial dynamics and sexual politics, where an oppressive white European man facilitates a white Creole woman’s cross-racial identification with Afro-Caribbeans. However, the political and literary landscape of the West Indies in the 1970s made such cross-racial identification untenable. As a result, “The Imperial Road” is full of disturbing racial hatred, prejudice, and resentment. And yet, it also reflects Rhys’s honest and serious concern over a white Creole’s racial identity in postcolonial Dominica, raising a difficult question: How would a postcolonial age change a white Creole identity that belongs neither to the colonized nor to the colonizer (or both)? In “The Imperial Road,” unable to identify with Afro-Caribbeans, the white Creole is disoriented in time and space, lost at home, stuck between the past and the present, not knowing how to participate in a postcolonial homeland. Through the narrator’s racial disorientation, “The Imperial Road” exposes the white Creole’s fundamental dependence on other Creoles.
Abstract
“The Imperial Road” is Jean Rhys’s unfinished manuscript, rejected by publishers for its openly racist tone. Although it describes Rhys’s actual visit to Dominica in 1936, it is not a transparent recollection of the travel but a recreation informed by racial dynamics of the 1970s when she wrote the text. This paper examines the manuscript as a troubled (and troubling) response to what Rhys perceived as racial rejection from Dominica at the wake of political independence. Rhys’s representation of white Creole womanhood significantly depends on an interwoven configuration of racial dynamics and sexual politics, where an oppressive white European man facilitates a white Creole woman’s cross-racial identification with Afro-Caribbeans. However, the political and literary landscape of the West Indies in the 1970s made such cross-racial identification untenable. As a result, “The Imperial Road” is full of disturbing racial hatred, prejudice, and resentment. And yet, it also reflects Rhys’s honest and serious concern over a white Creole’s racial identity in postcolonial Dominica, raising a difficult question: How would a postcolonial age change a white Creole identity that belongs neither to the colonized nor to the colonizer (or both)? In “The Imperial Road,” unable to identify with Afro-Caribbeans, the white Creole is disoriented in time and space, lost at home, stuck between the past and the present, not knowing how to participate in a postcolonial homeland. Through the narrator’s racial disorientation, “The Imperial Road” exposes the white Creole’s fundamental dependence on other Creoles.
참고문헌 (20)
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