‘Part of the narrative of modern art yet not central enough to be considered constitutive’

J. Dillon Brown observes a ‘prominent and long abiding’ divide between ‘critics seeing Jean Rhys either as a modernist or a postcolonial writer. ’Rhys’ narrative does not describe an encounter between ‘the folk’ and the metropole–arguably it hardly describes the folk at all–but an encounter between a member of the white creole elite and the colonising man, to whom she is a familiar stranger, a distant relative. Both Rhys and Claude McKay posed nude for modernist painters, experiences that recalled the dynamics of slavery in their respective Caribbean homelands. Peter Kalliney argues that late colonial and early postcolonial intellectuals were ‘strongly attracted to the modernist idea of aesthetic autonomy’ but also ‘acknowledged neither the full compatibility, nor the absolute irreconcilability, of their aesthetic and political platforms.’ In addition to long being considered Rhys’ and McKay’s final novels, Banana Bottom and Wide Sargasso Sea are also the only ones to significantly treat Obeah.