Offers close readings of three texts that foreground the problems, possibilities and struggle involved in forging affective connections across difference between women: Kate Clanchy,What is She Doing Here?, 2008, Jamaica Kincaid,Lucy, 1991a and Marlene Van Niekerk, ‘Labour’, 2004. Argues that the incomplete and partial nature of affective moments represented in these texts signals possibilities for a cautiously redefined idea of affective feminist solidarity as it is mobilized in the intimacy of domestic spaces.
Read in the context of the Americas and the plantation system, Jean Rhys's fiction is a global vision of modernity. The vision appears through colonialist stereotypes of idle and lazy West Indians displayed in dynamic interaction with scenes of actual toil and servitude that appear everywhere in Rhys's fiction. Focuses on Voyage in the Dark (1934), the short story ‘Temps Perdi’ and Rhys's last novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966).
