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Spaces of Resistance and Transformation: Caribbean Islands Between Dystopia and Creolotopia in Wide Sargasso Sea
oleh: Ping Su, Shoujuan Huang
| Format: | Article |
|---|---|
| Diterbitkan: | Island Studies Journal 2022-11-01 |
Deskripsi
Jean Rhys’s best-known novel _Wide Sargasso Sea_, writing back to Charlotte Brontë’s classic _Jane Eyre_, is set in the exuberant natural world of the post-emancipation Caribbean. Despite its harsh depiction of cruelty, self-deception, and hypocrisy in the human world, the novel conveys a sympathetic impression of Caribbean society. The novel’s utopian/dystopian tension is centered on its imagining of the Caribbean as a paradoxical site of coexisting dystopia and creolotopia. This article focuses on spaces lived in by individual characters, aiming to show that _Wide Sargasso Sea’s_ Caribbean islands can be read as both dystopian spaces of resistance and creolotopian spaces of transformation. Counter to colonial utopian imaginary, the tropical islands in the novel are presented as an evil, ugly, and diseased world for both white colonizers and the colonized, yet they are simultaneously portrayed as a special Caribbean creolotopia formed through archipelagic thinking and the process of creolization, as embodied in the lived experiences of the black woman Christophine. By resisting the binarism of victim/victimizer and envisioning utopia and creolotopia in the same space, the novel subverts the binary thinking that dominates Western epistemology.