Abstract
http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1420186/
The Creole authors Jean Rhys – bornon Dominica in the former British West Indies –andHella S. Haase– fromthe former Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia – challenge the idea oftemporallyunified colonial pasts as neatly preceding the postcolonial present. They do so by blending past and present in workson decolonisationpublished in the UKandthe Netherlands. The real-life events of the authors’ colonial re-patriation further stress thatcolonial unity is a construction. Within the colonial system,Rhys’s and Haasse’s biographical movements from the colonies to the European metropolises London and Amsterdam are consideredre-turns to familiar motherlands (re-patriation). Yet Haasse and Rhys illustrate the complexities attached to these so-called ‘returns’ by staging and creatively appropriating them in their novels, showing a temporal and spatial disunity that proves to be inherent to both colonialism and post/colonialism.
Keywords
Hella S. Haasse, Jean Rhys, Nostalgia, Colonial heritage in literature, Post/colonial theory
How to Cite
van Gemert, S., (2014) “Of Unity and Disunity in-between: The post/colonial ‘unhomely’ in the works and lives of Jean Rhys and Hella S. Haasse”, Tropos 1(1).
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