Under the skin of British History bodies in transit in Andrea Levy's "Small Island" (2004)

Although most of West Indians had British citizenship and believed they were answering the call of their "mother country" for which many of them had served in World War II, they soon met hostility and discrimination from the white population in the UK. The brutal episode of the childbirth, with Queenie's asking Hortense, whose wedding dress is all soaked in placenta blood, to cut the umbilical cord is a shocking mise-en-scène of this new world order. The same destabilising quality that is attributed to the female body can be granted to the "black body", which in the colonial discourse is constructed as ugly, dirty, defiled, impure, contaminated or sick. The connections between Queenie's middle-class home and her white female body conjure up the idea of a nation equally permeable and fragile, and dismantle the fantasy of ethnic absolutism operating at the heart of the British empire

“Today I Have Left My Armor at Home” Revisiting Jean Rhys’s Interwar Novels after the Ethical Turn

Within the critical interpretation that too often conflates life and fiction, the so-called "Jean Rhys woman" has resisted full assimilation by a feminist literary canon that advocates empowerment and agency. Browsing through Rhys's bibliography, it is interesting to note the considerable number of titles that suggest a commiserating attitude towards both the novelist and her female characters. Rhys's nomads, expatriates and zombielike figures have been analysed from the prism of postcolonial criticism as strongly inspired by the novelist's Caribbean background, their undecidable and precarious nature might be explained as part of what Butler has termed "certain exclusionary conceptions of who is normatively human". Other instances of abject corporealities can be found in Rhys's allusion to mannequins and inanimate bodies that elicited particular fascination in the interwar period, when huge numbers of injured soldiers acquired arms and legs prostheses, thus imposing new ways of thinking the body and its limits