Intimacies of empire: Post-colonial women's writing from the Caribbean, France and United States (Marguerite Duras, Marie Chauvet, Patricia Powell, Jamaica)

Through a discussion of post-colonial women's texts written in the Caribbean, France and United States, this dissertation explores questions of reading practices and participates in recent discussions among post-colonial critics about how to conduct comparative analyses across geo-political spaces and beyond linguistic, ethnic and national borders. Marguerite Duras' L'Amant (1984), Marie Chauvet's Love, Anger, Madness (1968), and Patricia Powell's The Pagoda (1998), are normally kept separate by academic disciplines and literary canons. Yet their thematic similarities are striking and warrant comparative consideration. Set in colonial cities or formerly colonized territories of the British and French Empires, these novels reveal the dangerous liaisons between race, sexuality, gender, class, desire and violence in the colonial contest. They explore how to give testimony to histories of cultural collision and claim subjectivities that do not remain simply locked in the violence of the past.