Alison Donnell
Department of English
The Nottingham Trent University

Caribbean Networking Women, 1900-1949 ‘Voices Out of Place: Silenced Networks and Strained Belongings

This paper will examine three moments in a potential history of women’s networking between Jamaica and the UK and discuss how and why these moments have been silenced. The first will focus on Marson’s political journalism about her time spent in Britain and in particular the way in which, despite having so much to say, she articulates her own silencing when in direct contact with colonial institutions. The second will examine Albinia Hutton’s Scottish idiom poetry written in Jamaica at the beginning of the twentieth century and the different ways in which her voice seems ‘out of place’, both in its own time and ours. Hutton’s poems work against the critical pull of transnational modernism to reveal aesthetic and cultural isolation through a different model of strained belonging. The third will look at Simon Gikandi’s silencing of women in his version of London-based Pan-Africanism and speculate on all the shared moments between Caribbean men and women in the UK that have not been recorded. As a whole the paper aims to explore the ways in which gender and cultural politics have shaped the archives and therefore the research and production of knowledge relating to Caribbean women’s writing 1900-1949.