Close Encounters: Solidarity, Servitude and Postcolonial Feminist Affects and Affiliations

Abstract

This essay offers close readings of three texts that in different ways foreground the problems, possibilities and struggle involved in forging affective connections across difference between women: Kate Clanchy, What is She Doing Here? 2008, Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy, 1991a and Marlene Van Niekerk, ‘Labour’, 2004. The author argues that the incomplete and partial nature of affective moments represented in these texts signals possibilities for a cautiously redefined idea of affective feminist solidarity as it is mobilized in the intimacy of domestic spaces.

Keywords:

• feminism
• affect
• thinking
• feeling
• labour
• narration
• servitude
• domestic
• intimacy
• postcolonial

Notes

1 The phrase also appears in the title of Robin Morgan's Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women's Movement (Morgan 1996).

2 I am thinking here of Edward Said's ideas of the contrapuntal in The World, the Text and the Critic (1983); Édouard Glissant's poetics of entanglement in Poetics of Relation (1997); and Wilson Harris's cross-cultural imagination in The Womb of Space (1983).

3 For a discussion of affective labour, see Hochschild (1983).

4 She notes that, under the English, the text is also inscribed in an African language which, to her shame, she does not recognize.

5 The memoir suggests an almost idyllic view of Blixen's benign management of her Gikuyu farm labourers (on what was their land).