Otherness and Displacement in Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Abstract

English hegemonic colonial rule of the other parts of the world was based on unequal power relations and the domination of people from different cultures and ancestral backgrounds. Like the other colonized territories, the Caribbean was one of the countries whose social, political and cultural structure was dominated by England. During its rule in the Caribbean, Britain enslaved black people and forced them to work in the sugar cane plantations thus, created hostility between the Creoles and the black. More importantly, the colonizer othered the indigenous dwellers and the colonized people felt secure neither in their homelands nor in the colonizer's country which led to displacement. After the proclamation of independence, postcolonial writers from the former colonies tackle post-independence problems inherited by colonization in their work. Jean Rhys also handles controversial postcolonial concepts in her work. Her novel titled Wide Sargasso Sea is a notable narrative of the turbulent Caribbean life after the Emancipation. This paper in this sense explores Wide Sargasso Sea in terms of its representation of otherness and displacement in the context of postcolonial studies.