Abstract
This article analyzes Una Marson’s short story “Sojourn” in tandem with fiction by West African journalist Mabel Dove, as well as contemporaneous newspaper references to fabric and attire. It uses the symbolic resonances of cloth to ask what we might see if the colonial subject waiting in the wings is a desiring female subject. The interwar period coincides with key moments in Anglophone Caribbean nationalism as well as anthropological interest in working-class female intimate relations. If centering the middle-class Jamaican
woman’s leisure and intimacy risks ideological conservatism, it offers an opportunity to be less sure about the endgame of nationalism – about what was desired – in a period that tends to be narrated in terms of the forward march to nationhood. Finally, it provides a chance to put West Africa and the Caribbean in a contemporaneous rather than diasporic, non-coeval relationship.