Kaneesha Parsard, The Friending Plot

"The Friending Plot"
University of Chicago
October 15, 2022
Kaneesha Parsard, Assistant Professor of English

Was the marriage plot of 18th- and 19th-century English literature, which saw women characters stake their futures to domesticity, universal? What were the colonies' plotlines? In Trinidad during the 1920s and 1930s, a group of writers penned short stories about working-class women who—amidst a global depression and personal hardship—reject marriage in favor of casual, transactional relationships known as "friending." This session offers the friending plot, in which subsistence, giving and receiving care, and pleasure in the present are the order of the day.