Jean Rhys's Racial Disorientation: "The Imperial Road" and the Question of Racial Identification in the 1970s

The Imperial Road is Jean Rhys s unfinished manuscript, rejected by publishers for its openly racist tone. Although it describes Rhys s actual visit to Dominica in 1936, it is not a transparent recollection of the travel but a recreation informed by racial dynamics of the 1970s when she wrote the text. This paper examines the manuscript as a troubled (and troubling) response to what Rhys perceived as racial rejection from Dominica at the wake of political independence. Rhys s representation of white Creole womanhood significantly depends on an interwoven configuration of racial dynamics and sexual politics, where an oppressive white European man facilitates a white Creole woman s cross-racial identification with Afro-Caribbeans. However, the political and literary landscape of the West Indies in the 1970s made such cross-racial identification untenable. As a result, The Imperial Road is full of disturbing racial hatred, prejudice, and resentment. And yet, it also reflects Rhys s honest and serious concern over a white Creole s racial identity in postcolonial Dominica, raising a difficult question: How would a postcolonial age change a white Creole identity that belongs neither to the colonized nor to the colonizer (or both)? In The Imperial Road, unable to identify with Afro-Caribbeans, the white Creole is disoriented in time and space, lost at home, stuck between the past and the present, not knowing how to participate in a postcolonial homeland. Through the narrator s racial disorientation, The Imperial Road exposes the white Creole s fundamental dependence on other Creoles.