| Beginning with Madam Mediator, Margaret Cavendish's liminal character in her closet drama The Convent of Pleasure, this study examines the mediation between complicity and subversion required of women writers seeking access to publication and circulation in the late seventeenth century. Contemporaries Aphra Behn and Maria Sibylla Merian emerge as skilled mediators navigating not only complicity and subversion, but also the Atlantic itself during missions to European colonies in Surinam where few men with far more resources dared venture. After profound cross-cultural encounters, they produced writing that conformed sufficiently to gain wide audiences, but that also archived subversive responses to imperial racism and sexism for subsequent women writers to recover. One such writer, Beryl Gilroy, born in Guyana the 1920's, recovers mediated subversions like those in Behn's and Merian's works as what Raymond Williams calls "structures of feeling" awaiting incorporation into hegemonic culture. Using her Atlanticist position to difuse her subaltern status, Gilroy transforms archived structures of feeling in the works of 17th century women writers into fully voiced tropicopolitan blasts at the foundations of empire. In the process, Gilroy models what Laura Brown calls radical contemporeneity, but Gilroy does it across cultures as well as time, drawing out of the enocunters among structures of feeling about race and sex "quantum leaps" of imagination, as Adrienne Rich calls them, that "spark like a dialectic," as Audre Lorde asserts, from which 21st century writers can begin to forumlate visions of human interaction without racist and sexist oppression. |
