Jacques Pierre Brissot founded the Society of the Friends of the Blacks in Paris in early 1788. Although primarily operational in Paris, the society was very much an Atlantic organization. Through superficial examinations of the efforts of the Friends of the Blacks, scholars have categorized the French movement as based solely in the printed word and engagement through revolutionary assemblies. Taken in isolation from other Atlantic philanthropic activity, the movement appears diminutive, sporadic, and ineffectual. Yet, France granted rights to free people of color and abolished slavery – lasting from 1794 to 1802 – before England, the United States, and other countries deeply entangled in the Atlantic struggle over the status of peoples of African descent. The French movement was not a failure; it was part of a longer process of abolition. While late eighteenth-century efforts did not bring about the permanent end to slavery in the French Caribbean – something only achieved in 1848 – those like Brissot advocated for peoples of African descent during the French Revolution, laying the groundwork for the later success of the nineteenth-century abolitionists.

In her unfinished autobiography, Jean Rhys (1890–1979) describes the birth of her writing career as a quasi-memorial for herself as a person: buying some black exercise books and the red, blue, green and yellow quill pens to ‘cheer up’ her table and banish its bareness, Rhys represents her writing out of her unhappy first love affair as a compulsive purgation of the experience, but one that left her bereft in the recognition that something in her had died. ‘I filled three exercise books and half another, then I wrote: “Oh God, I'm only twenty and I'll have to go on living and living and living.” I knew then that it was finished and that there was no more to say.’ From this genesis of art in inner death, Rhys went on to write five novels and numerous short stories that present a strikingly consistent world view and aesthetic, both of which hearken back to the affective stance she assumes in her earliest writing and then reiterates throughout her work up to and including her posthumously published autobiography. From her despairing diaries written at the age of twenty to her death nearly seventy years later, Rhys examined in meticulously polished prose a set of themes including the workings of the mind and emotion, gender and race relations, colonial history and, as we argue in this introduction, a certain spectrality of existence. Jean Rhys: Twenty- First-Century Approaches examines this cogency of style and world view from the major approaches that have defined Rhys criticism, and brings them together with emerging theoretical work to set the course for Rhys studies in the twenty-first century.

Much has been written about how Rhys's work defies periodisation and transcends categories, in the same way that her characters wander nomadically and live on the edges of what Sasha in Good Morning, Midnight thinks of as ‘you, who represent Society’. She is viewed as a modernist, postcolonial, Caribbean, British and Creole writer – yet to parse these identities is to fall short of the complexity of her work and the ways in which it troubles the very categories through which she is read. For example, the Caribbean where Rhys spent her youth, on the island of Dominica, bubbles up most prominently in her first manuscript and in her last novel alike;…

Jean Rhys evinces a scepticism about human beings throughout her work in the sense that her protagonists regard others – and Europeans in particular – as lacking compassion at best and as predatory at worst. Each of her novels written during the modernist period presents a world in which her female protagonists are besieged by poverty, exile, loneliness, and abasement at the hands of men and women who consistently treat them with contempt. She describes human beings as spiteful, cold, and at one point as ‘upholstered ghosts’; her take on the human condition is that it is a brutal one that her protagonists do well to survive (when they do); as Sasha says in Good Morning, Midnight, ‘“I think most human beings have cruel eyes.” That rosy, wooden, innocent cruelty’ (404). In the face of such antipathy, Rhys's heroines demonstrate a pronounced identification with non- human agencies such as ghosts, animals, and objects, as though to escape or at least extend their subjectivities beyond the limits of their own imperilled bodies, and to enter into an affective state that Rhys repeatedly refers to as ‘indifference’. This outsourcing of identity to machines, mirrors, mannequins, dolls, kittens, horses, zombies, and so forth, may be in part a defence mechanism against the oppressive conditions under which they live, but one effect of Rhys's portraiture is that she pushes the boundaries of the body and of the subject in directions only recently explored by theories of the posthuman condition and affect.

Beginning with Deleuze and Guattari's theorisation of embodied existence as ‘deterritorialized flows of desire’ and as a ‘desiring machine that escapes [Oedipal] codes as lines of escape leading elsewhere’, the notion of the posthuman reconfigures subjectivity as a rhizomatic interaction between desires, affects, and their objects– which in this scenario then cease to be objects and become coextensive with the desiring machine. Building on more recent theories of the posthuman, this chapter examines the enmeshment of Rhys's protagonists with material and spectral elements in order to understand her distinct representation of the affective flows of modern subjectivity. As Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston point out in Posthuman Bodies, ‘the posthuman marks a solidarity between disenchanted liberal subjects and those who were always-already disenchanted’;…