Book dossier

Positioning gender and race in (post)colonial plantation space

by Eve Walsh Stoddard, Eve Walsh Stoddard, E. Stoddard

"The Ethics of Gender in the (Post)colonial Plantation Space uses the Anglophone Caribbean and Ireland to examine the complex inflections of women and race as articulated in-between the colonial discursive and material formations of the eighteenth century and those of the (post)colonial twentieth century, as structured by the defined spaces of the colonizers' estates. Using the history and geography, memory and place signified by the remnants of the plantation system, the author will analyze the particular instantiations of women emerging as agents in the similarities and differences of particular post-colonial situations"-- "As part of a growing interdisciplinary literature on the "green and black Atlantic," this book examines the spatial impact of Caribbean plantations and Anglo-Irish estates on present-day, post-colonial representations of raced and gendered national identities shaped in reaction to British colonialism. Placed in relation to actual estates, the novels used as case studies provide gendered subjectivities that evolve within the economic and social conditions of Ireland, Barbados, Jamaica, and St. Kitts. Following a survey of the ideology and aesthetics of trans-Atlantic Palladian architecture, the book reads a matrix of novels that legitimate the incarceration of women through racial difference: Castle Rackrent, Jane Eyre, and Wide Sargasso Sea. Within this context, the book examines contemporary texts by Austin C. Clarke, Edna O'Brien, Nuala O'Faolain, and Caryl Phillips that critique colonized historiography, challenging the representation of the post-colonial nation as encoded in the estate house and the male-centered definition of the nation"--