Decolonising the body in Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark and Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy

This master’s thesis examines the literature of the Caribbean diaspora and investigates how it subverts colonial paradigms. Therein, the use of the material body as a subaltern knowledge system is read as an act of decolonial resistance. The analysis focuses on two English-language novels by 20th-century female authors originally from the Caribbean: the 1934 novel Voyage in the Dark by the British author Jean Rhys, born in Dominica; and Lucy by the Antiguan-American writer Jamaica Kincaid, published in 1990. Both novels tell the stories of young women from the Caribbean who leave their islands to work in Western metropolises (London and New York, respectively). Both young women reject colonial categories such as race and gender, which are used to understand and control their bodies. Instead, they use the experience of their own bodies as a knowledge system through which they can understand the world around them. In the analysis, the theory of “affective embodied encounters” by Sara Ahmed is brought together with the decolonial theory of Édouard Glissant. Building on Glissant’s concept of the “right to opacity”, it is argued that the opaque material body can be a tool of decolonial resistance. In both novels, the Caribbean female characters strive for a right to material opacity by rejecting colonial classifications of their own bodies and the bodies of others. Building on this theoretical basis, the following chapters provide analyses of how specific body parts are each associated with colonial categories that are used to control marginalized bodies. These are: (1) the skin, the description of which in the novels brings out the colonial categories of race/skin colour and aesthetic beauty; (2) the role of the hands, through which it is shown how the colonial Other is read as a working body; and (3) the mouth, which in the novels makes clear how colonial languages and linguistic systems oppress the colonised body. The final chapter examines how the texts themselves can be read formally as opaque bodies by transcending and going beyond the form of the Western novel.

Level thesis:degree_level

master

Grantor dc:publisher

Universität Potsdam

Year

2025

Author dc:creator

• Douglas, Elliot

Contributors dc:contributor

• Eckstein, Lars
• Waller, Nicole

• Caribbean
• postcolonial
• opacity
• affect
• materialism
• embodiment
• Jamaica Kincaid
• Jean Rhys
• Karibik
• Postkolonialismus
• Materialismus
• Körper

Statement dc:rights

• Keine öffentliche Lizenz: Unter Urheberrechtsschutz

Repository record source_url

https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/70139

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:kobv.de-opus4-uni-potsdam:70139