Rooms Not One's Own: C. L. R. James, Jean Rhys, and Caribbean Anticolonialism in 1930s London

Abstract

Abstract:In the 1930s, C. L. R. James and Jean Rhys wrote of London lodging houses—spaces that challenged imperialist narratives idealizing the private home and white nuclear family. Both writers also dramatized the difficulty of imagining Caribbean futures that dispense with the hierarchies of the colonial past and the imperialist logics of their surroundings. Enjambing the London lodging house with Caribbean geographies, James's essays for The Port of Spain Gazette and Rhys's novel Voyage in the Dark generate an anticolonial imagination that resists prescriptive visions of a postcolonial Caribbean and, instead, implicate readers in the making of an alternate future.