SOURCE: Thomas, Sue. “Modernity, Voice, and Window-Breaking: Jean Rhys's ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’.” In De-Scribing Empire: Post-Colonialism and Textuality, edited by Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson, pp. 185-200. London: Routledge, 1994.

In the following essay, Thomas utilizes Rhys's “Let Them Call It Jazz” to discuss the tension between the West Indian colonial milieu of her writing and the modernist European perspective and places the story within an historical and feminist context.

Like Mary Lou Emery's, my project on Rhys negotiates the ‘tension between the two spaces or contexts of Rhys's writing—the West Indian colonial context and the modernist European—as it is inscribed in terms of sex/gender relations in her novels' (Emery 1990: xii). The translation of Rhys's fiction into an exclusively modernist European cultural and literary context—a characteristic move in Rhys criticism—exhibits the ‘logic of translation-as-violation’ discussed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1986) in ‘Imperialism and...