Trans/national dis/connections:Silenced networks and strained belongings with reference to Albinia Catherine MacKay and Una Marson

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Donnell, Alison ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8722-6974 (2005) Trans/national dis/connections:Silenced networks and strained belongings with reference to Albinia Catherine MacKay and Una Marson. In: Modernist Women Race Nation. Mango Publishing, pp. 84-96. ISBN 9781902294292

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Abstract

This paper seeks to examine the particular operations of gender and cultural politics that both shaped and restrained possible 'networked' interactions between Jamaican women and their British 'motherlands' during the first forty years of the twentieth century. Paying particular attention to the poetry of Albinia Catherine MacKay (a Scots Creole) and the political journalism of Una Marson (a black Jamaica), I shall seek to examine why both writers speak in and of voices out of place. MacKay's poems work against the critical pull of transnational modernism to reveal aesthetic and cultural isolation through a model of strained belonging in relation to both her Jamaica home and an ancestral Scotland. A small number of poems from her 1912 collection that are dedicated to the historical struggle between the English and Scots for the rule of Scotland and cultural self-determination, some of which are written in a Scottish idiom, may help us to read the complex cultural negotiations that silently inform the seemingly in commensurability of location and locution revealed in these works. In contrast, Marson's journalism, although less known even than her creative writings, is both politically and intellectually radical in its arguments concerning the mutual articulation of race and gender empowerment. However, Marson remains aware of her inability to articulate these convictions with force in a British context and thereby of the way in which speaking out of place also silences her.

Item Type: Book Section
Faculty \ School: Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing
UEA Research Groups: Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Modern and Contemporary Writing Research Group
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Depositing User: Pure Connector
Date Deposited: 21 Jul 2017 05:05
Last Modified: 02 Mar 2023 10:32
URI: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/64216
DOI:

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