Other White

Abstract

In this hybrid personal/critical essay, novelist Monique Roffey reflects on Kei Miller's article, ‘The White Women and the Language of Bees’ (2018) and its suggestions about the ability of white Caribbean women to capture the language and lives of the people of the Caribbean. Referring back to the clash between Peter Hulme and E K Brathwaite in the pages of Wasafiri in the mid-1990s, Roffey draws on the work of Jean Rhys, Alison Donnell and Evelyn O'Callaghan to argue that there is a long tradition of positioning white women outside the bounds of Caribbean identity, a positioning that fails to recognise their unique relation to the Caribbean, Britain and the USA. Claiming her own identity as ‘Other White’, and therefore uniquely uncategorisable in/through the dominant discourses of race in the USA and UK, Roffey demands a more inclusive, ‘caribglobal’ understanding of the Caribbean literary community.

Keywords::

• Brathwaite
• Hulme
• Caribbean literature
• feminism
• race
• whiteness