My dissertation interrogates the legacy of settler colonialism across cultures through an analysis of women’s writing about the plantation. Domestic Disturbances: Home and History in Global Anglophone Women’s Writing argues that settler colonialism has produced literary forms which are uniquely invested in the issues of inheritance. Ireland, the American South, and the Caribbean share a problematic relationship with the past, one where cultural memory is continually contested and reimagined. Domestic Disturbances analyzes the ways that women writers navigate the violent history of the colonial past through the plantation home. I read novels by Elizabeth Bowen, Eudora Welty, Phyllis Shand Allfrey, Jean Rhys, and Tana French as products of a transnational settler colonial canon. Ultimately, I conclude that women’s writing about the plantation home is a crucial context for understanding, unpacking, and undermining colonial complicity.
Cover image by Valérie Anex from Ghost Estates
