“The Unhomely Moment”: Frieda Cassin’s Nineteenth-Century Antiguan Novel and the Construction of the White Creole

With reference to a little known nineteenth century novel by an Antiguan creole woman, With Silent Tread (c1890), this paper examines the different ways in which female creole whiteness is constructed in the West Indies and in England. Paradoxically, “transcultural whiteness” exposes the ambivalence of such racial distinctions in the colonial context, and underscores the need for a more nuanced perception of whiteness as well as blackness in the Caribbean.