Proposes a reading of Donna Hemans' novel River Woman in relation to other contemporary Caribbean women writers and to the early fiction of Toni Morrison. Argues that the complex affects that her representation of 'child-shifting' produces can be articulated in relation to literary texts that re-imagine historical and contemporary practices leaving a child in order to save her and in the context of the plantation.
Attempts to develop ideas concerning the gendering of creolisation and a historicising of affects within it. Addressing affects as 'physiological things' contextualized in the history of the Caribbean slave plantation,seeks to delineate a trajectory and development of a specific Creole history in relation to affects.
