ABSTRACT
Drawing from Delia Jarrett-Macauley’s biography The Life of Una Marson, 1905–65 (2010 [1998]), and Lisa Tomlinson’s biography Una Marson (2019), this chapter focuses on Una Marson’s first sojourn from Kingston to London in 1932. Una Marson was a journalist, public speaker, playwright, editor, and poet. This chapter interrogates Marson’s migration as a black woman writer faced with structures of colonialism present in the UK. It utilizes decolonial and postcolonial theory to situate Western notions of human and humanity examining how these notions are inherently embedded in modernity. This chapter retraces Marson’s arrival in London by critically reading her biography, selected texts, and in particular her play London Calling (2016 [1937]). It speculates that Marson was dehumanized not only as a colonial subject at the heart of the British empire, but as a black woman whose presence embodied racial and gender extremes of colonial difference. Understanding Marson’s position and selected texts through the lenses of coloniality, as developed by decolonial scholars as Aníbal Quijano, María Lugones, Sylvia Wynter, and Walter Mignolo, further explains why fantasies of blackness, femaleness, and otherness are still present in Euro-American discourses of being human. By examining similar themes in Marson’s life and writings, this chapter tentatively connects her life to a larger social history of colonialism, racism, and sexism in defining human and humanity within a Euro-American ontology of being.
