Giovanna Covi
Researcher in Anglo-American Literature
University of Trento
ITALY

Una Marson as Networking Woman

I will focus on Una Marson's poems, plays and the journal she edited in Jamaica, The Cosmopolitan. Leafing through the pages of The Cosmopolitan it becomes evident that Marson very early in her life had clear in mind that her mission was to stablish a center of culture. I argue that since her youth years this project served as a generator of an innovative discourse capable of articulating intercultural relationships across gender, sexuality, race, nationality, class. The way her journalistic works interacts with some verses in her poetry confirms that her literary activity was an intimate life project, sadly one too ambitious and for which she paid the high price of depression and isolation. Not accidentally, then, was she on the foreground of political movements and, yet again, not accidentally, was her action always the result of a collaboration with other women. Una Marson never quite fit into one pre-given category and in my published paper on her work I have decided to employ the concept of queer theory to capture the subversive meaning of her writings and actions. In the context of networking women, Una Marson figures more prominently than she does within the canon of Caribbean Literature precisely because of her extraordinary networking ability (links in our database through keywods such as racism, nationalism, beauty, feminism, liberation movements, love, blues, etc. clearly demonstrate this).