The Imperial Archive
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Welcome to the Christophine site
on the History and Literature of
the Caribbean
It was a discoloured face-- it was a savage face. I wish I could forget the roll of the red eyes and the fearful blackened inflamation of the lineaments!
(from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, 1847)
The Caribbean region has contributed a great deal to recent debates on the state of literature and the position of the writer after the collapse of Empire. This site aims to outline some of the main sites of resistance to the colonial project, and the range of resources regarding the work of Jean Rhys. An examination of Charlotte Brontë's work is also necessary to an understanding of the forces which caused Rhys to react and produce one of the richest examples of "writing back to the centre," (in the terms of Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin) of the twentieth century.
The exhibit is divided into eight sections, each of which can enrich our understanding of Rhys's project. The methodology is historicist, as an understanding of the circumstances which informed Rhys's work can only aid an examination of that work, especially for a student working in a geographically distant location:
- Slavery
- Voodoo
- Charlotte Brontë biography
- Colonial discourse in Jane Eyre
- "Jane’s all White": An Examination of Victorian Chromatic Anxiety in Jane Eyre
- Bertha Must Be Kept Silent
- Missionary Work & Charlotte Brontë
- From Antoinette to Bertha: the process of 'colonising' within the marriage in Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea
- Postcolonial discourse in Wide Sargasso Sea
- Bhabha’s Mimicry and Man: Destabilizing the Colonial Paradigm
- Jean Rhys biography
- Annotated bibliography
- List of related web sites
This project was completed under the direction of Dr Leon Litvack as a requirement for the MA degree in Modern Literary Studies in the School of English at the Queen's University of Belfast. The site is evolving and will include contributions from future generations of MA students on other writers and themes.
