Close Encounters: Solidarity,Servitude and Postcolonial Feminist Affects and Affiliations

Abstract

This essay offers close readings of three texts that in different ways foreground the problems, possibilities and struggle involved in forging affective connections across difference between women: Kate Clanchy, What is She Doing Here? 2008, Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy, 1991a and Marlene Van Niekerk, ‘Labour’, 2004. The author argues that the incomplete and partial nature of affective moments represented in these texts signals possibilities for a cautiously redefined idea of affective feminist solidarity as it is mobilized in the intimacy of domestic spaces.