Who is Christophine?: The Good Black Servant and the Contradictions of (Racial) Liberalism
In a special PMLA issue on "Comparative Racialization," ShuMei Shih argues that "Even though South Asia-based postcolonial theory has geared us to the study of colonialism and its consequent postcolonial complexities, it has also long held a strongly ambivalent relation to race studies" (1347). Whether or not we agree with Shih's characterization of the ambivalence toward race studies within "South Asia-based postcolonial theory," her essay correctly points to an unfortunate divide between scholarship on race and postcoloniality. Aiming to bridge this divide, this paper revisits an ongoing debate among postcolonial scholars on the racial politics of a celebrated anticolonial text, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea. Although a beneficiary of this debate, I argue that what is missing from the conversation is a more robust engagement with the limits and contradictions of Wide Sargasso Sea's liberalism. By reading Rhys's 1966 novel alongside the 1831 liberal antislavery treatise, The History of Mary Prince, I model a comparative reading practice that is informed by prominent critiques of liberal theory and practice emerging out of race studies. Such a comparative reading of Rhys's text throws light on the elisions of postcolonial criticism, even while recognizing how this mode of