Chapter 1 - Writing and the Responsibility to Memory: The Role of White Female Planters in Contemporary Caribbean Novels

Summary

The white female planter is an understudied figure in Caribbean history and literature. This essay follows the idea of the gendered responsibility to memory using the methodology of feminist rehearsal to examine representations of white women plantation owners in a range of contemporary Caribbean novels. The essay recounts the heated debates among the region’s literary critics and writers around the status of the white woman as author and character, while also looking at the literary characterization of women who had titular (or representative) plantation power and others who owned plantations outright. Most of the novels deploy intertextuality and multiple timelines to recuperate and consciously rehearse experiences missing or invisible in official chronicles. These novels explore the intersectional ideological negotiations that shaped the imperial spaces of the plantation and the lives that were lived within that terrain.