Suzanne Scafe - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Suzanne Scafe

Research paper thumbnail of Now the half has been told: Resistance and the fiction of four contemporary Caribbean women writers

All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is d e p e n d e n ... more All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is d e p e n d e n t upon the quality of the copy subm itted. In the unlikely e v e n t that the a u thor did not send a c o m p le te m anuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if m aterial had to be rem oved, a n o te will ind ica te the deletion.

Research paper thumbnail of The Heart of the Race: black women's lives in Britain

... The heart of the race: Black women's lives in Britain. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: Aut... more ... The heart of the race: Black women's lives in Britain. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: Author: Bryan, Beverley (b. 1949, d. ----. Author: Dadzie, Stella (b. 1952, d. ----. Author: Scafe, Suzanne (b. 1954, d. ----. PUBLISHER: Virago (London). SERIES TITLE: YEAR: 1985. ...

Research paper thumbnail of Performing Ellen: Mojisola Adebayo’s Moj of the Antarctic: An African Odyssey (2008) and Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; Or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (1860)

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

The subject of Mojisola Adebayo’s one-woman performance, Moj of the Antarctic: An African Odyssey... more The subject of Mojisola Adebayo’s one-woman performance, Moj of the Antarctic: An African Odyssey, is Ellen Craft, an ex-slave whose escape from the slave-owning state of Georgia to England in the late 1840s is recounted in the escape narrative Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; Or the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery. Rather than using her performance to present her biographical subject with an interiority the original slave narrative scarcely offers her, Adebayo reconstitutes Ellen and relocates her in an auto/biographical work that self-consciously blurs the boundaries between autobiography, biography, and biofiction, thus exposing the overlap and interdependency of these textual forms. Through a detailed analysis of both texts and their contexts, this essay argues that Adebayo constructs a figurative, first person auto/biography of Ellen Craft, a “call and response” production, originating in an “intimate, somatic engagement with the body of another”, whose “tou...

Research paper thumbnail of “Qu’est-ce Qu’elle Dit? What she say, what she say?” Translating the Resisting Other in Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Writing

Synthesis: an Anglophone Journal of Comparative Literary Studies

I focus my discussion of Amryl Johnson’s poem “Qu’est-ce Qu’elle Dit”, Erna Brodber’s second nove... more I focus my discussion of Amryl Johnson’s poem “Qu’est-ce Qu’elle Dit”, Erna Brodber’s second novel Myal, and Merle Collins’s The Colour of Forgetting, on the texts’ representations of cultural difference and cultural transformation. The poem and the novels, I argue, present a version of Caribbean history that resists colonial discourse and that effects a process of healing and recovery from the epistemic violence of colonial historiography and the continued imposition of its cultural norms. At the same time I suggest that part of the process of resistance involves a radical reconceptualising and transformation of the Other. In these texts, what Nathaniel Mackey defines as “artistic othering”(55) is, as I wish to demonstrate in this article, a mode of resistance, a textual strategy that confronts, resists and refuses a too easy reappropriation of meaning, and yet insists on possibility. I approach the three texts as examples of counterdiscursive praxis, as texts which make “an interv...

Research paper thumbnail of White Cliffs

Research paper thumbnail of Caribbean women’s short fiction: New voices, emerging perspectives

Short Fiction in Theory & Practice, 2016

Research paper thumbnail of Home/lessness, Exile and Triangular Identities in the Drama of Caryl Phillips

Modern and Contemporary Black British Drama, 2015

Research paper thumbnail of Re-mapping Women’s Testimonies into Networked Subjectivities: TheQuipu Project

Advances in Gender Research, 2016

Research paper thumbnail of Black Women Subjects in Auto/biographical Discourse

The Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature (1945–2010), 2000

Research paper thumbnail of Gruesome and Yet Fascinating": Hidden, Disgraced and Disregarded Cultural Forms in Jamaican Short Fiction 1938-50

Journal of Caribbean Literatures, Mar 22, 2010

Research paper thumbnail of Unsettling the Centre: Black British Fiction

The History of British Women’s Writing, 1970-Present, 2015

Research paper thumbnail of Re-placing Wealth, Re-mapping Social Division: Kingston in the Fiction of Brian Meeks and Diana McCaulay

Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 2015

In this article I trace the geographies of poverty and wealth represented in two contemporary Jam... more In this article I trace the geographies of poverty and wealth represented in two contemporary Jamaican novels, Brian Meeks’s

Research paper thumbnail of The Embracing ‘I’: Mothers and Daughters in Contemporary Black Women's Auto/biography

Women: A Cultural Review, 2009

T the centre of the two texts focused on here, Yvonne Brewster's The Undertaker&#x27... more T the centre of the two texts focused on here, Yvonne Brewster's The Undertaker's Daughter: The Colourful Life of a Theatre Director and Jacqueline Walker's Pilgrim State, is a fractured yet self-defining relation-ship between the auto/biographical subject and her mother. ...

Research paper thumbnail of XVII * New Literatures

The Year's Work in English Studies, 2013

Research paper thumbnail of Chain reactions: Black women organising

Race & Class, 1985

The voices of Black women who have suffered because of racist and discriminatory practices in thi... more The voices of Black women who have suffered because of racist and discriminatory practices in this country speak on every page of this book, so in this chapter we have concentrated on our organised responses. We have always been active in our community: we began by ...

Research paper thumbnail of Lives Written in Fragments: The Self-Representational ‘I’ in Caribbean Diasporic Women's Auto/biography

Research paper thumbnail of Women's Life Writing and Diaspora

Research paper thumbnail of ‘she found a way, left the child’: ‘child-shifting’1 as the plantation's affects and love's paradox in Donna Hemans’ River Woman

Feminist Review, 2013

This article proposes a situated reading of maternal love, loss and lovelessness in Donna Hemans’... more This article proposes a situated reading of maternal love, loss and lovelessness in Donna Hemans’ novel River Woman, locating her text in relation to other contemporary Caribbean women writers and to the early fiction of Toni Morrison. I argue that the complex affects that her representation of ‘child-shifting’ produces, can be articulated both in relation to literary texts that re-imagine historical and contemporary practices leaving a child in order to save her, and in the context of the plantation, where ruptured ties at the level of community and culture continue to be reproduced in the personal, emotional and family spheres. I use the concept of marronage, developed in the work of Glissant and Depestre, to define strategies of survival that necessitated actual and imaginative flight or escape, to contextualise the complex affects of the plantation that are repeated and reproduced in the novel's present—the late twentieth-century Caribbean.

Research paper thumbnail of Affect and Gendered Creolisation

Feminist Review, 2013

104 affect and gendered creolisation This special issue draws on papers developed from the confer... more 104 affect and gendered creolisation This special issue draws on papers developed from the conference 'Caribbean Women's Writing: Comparative Critical Conversations', held at Goldsmiths, University of London, in June 2011 to address questions concerning the legacy of plantation culture in its shaping of a gendered creolisation. Notably, several of the papers struck a chord in their interrogation of the representation of affects in the literature of the region and its diaspora. From these presentations engaging the broad theme of affects and creolisation (used interchangeably), we asked contributors to consider further the insights that Creole or Caribbean textualisation affords in discussion of Caribbean lives, whether local or transnational, especially in terms of gendered bodily affectivity and the female body's capacity to act. That such consideration needs take account of 'silence engendered through a particular historical violence' (Anim-Addo, 2007: 9), that of slavery, its attendant 'resistance circles' (Brathwaite, 2000: 98) and some 'rewriting [of] the patriarchal contract' (Mohammed, 1995: 20), among other concerns, is central to the challenge of this debate.

Research paper thumbnail of ‘Let Me Tell You How it Really Was’: Authority, Legitimacy and Fictive Structures of Reality in Contemporary Black Women’s Autobiography

Changing English, 2010

Department of Arts, Media and English, University of the South Bank, London, UK Taylor and Franci... more Department of Arts, Media and English, University of the South Bank, London, UK Taylor and Francis CCEN_A_479244.sgm 10.1080/13586841003787225 Changing English 1358-684X (print)/1469-3585 (online) Original Article 2010Taylor & Francis 172000000June 2010 ...

Research paper thumbnail of Now the half has been told: Resistance and the fiction of four contemporary Caribbean women writers

All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is d e p e n d e n ... more All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is d e p e n d e n t upon the quality of the copy subm itted. In the unlikely e v e n t that the a u thor did not send a c o m p le te m anuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if m aterial had to be rem oved, a n o te will ind ica te the deletion.

Research paper thumbnail of The Heart of the Race: black women's lives in Britain

... The heart of the race: Black women's lives in Britain. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: Aut... more ... The heart of the race: Black women's lives in Britain. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: Author: Bryan, Beverley (b. 1949, d. ----. Author: Dadzie, Stella (b. 1952, d. ----. Author: Scafe, Suzanne (b. 1954, d. ----. PUBLISHER: Virago (London). SERIES TITLE: YEAR: 1985. ...

Research paper thumbnail of Performing Ellen: Mojisola Adebayo’s Moj of the Antarctic: An African Odyssey (2008) and Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; Or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (1860)

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

The subject of Mojisola Adebayo’s one-woman performance, Moj of the Antarctic: An African Odyssey... more The subject of Mojisola Adebayo’s one-woman performance, Moj of the Antarctic: An African Odyssey, is Ellen Craft, an ex-slave whose escape from the slave-owning state of Georgia to England in the late 1840s is recounted in the escape narrative Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; Or the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery. Rather than using her performance to present her biographical subject with an interiority the original slave narrative scarcely offers her, Adebayo reconstitutes Ellen and relocates her in an auto/biographical work that self-consciously blurs the boundaries between autobiography, biography, and biofiction, thus exposing the overlap and interdependency of these textual forms. Through a detailed analysis of both texts and their contexts, this essay argues that Adebayo constructs a figurative, first person auto/biography of Ellen Craft, a “call and response” production, originating in an “intimate, somatic engagement with the body of another”, whose “tou...

Research paper thumbnail of “Qu’est-ce Qu’elle Dit? What she say, what she say?” Translating the Resisting Other in Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Writing

Synthesis: an Anglophone Journal of Comparative Literary Studies

I focus my discussion of Amryl Johnson’s poem “Qu’est-ce Qu’elle Dit”, Erna Brodber’s second nove... more I focus my discussion of Amryl Johnson’s poem “Qu’est-ce Qu’elle Dit”, Erna Brodber’s second novel Myal, and Merle Collins’s The Colour of Forgetting, on the texts’ representations of cultural difference and cultural transformation. The poem and the novels, I argue, present a version of Caribbean history that resists colonial discourse and that effects a process of healing and recovery from the epistemic violence of colonial historiography and the continued imposition of its cultural norms. At the same time I suggest that part of the process of resistance involves a radical reconceptualising and transformation of the Other. In these texts, what Nathaniel Mackey defines as “artistic othering”(55) is, as I wish to demonstrate in this article, a mode of resistance, a textual strategy that confronts, resists and refuses a too easy reappropriation of meaning, and yet insists on possibility. I approach the three texts as examples of counterdiscursive praxis, as texts which make “an interv...

Research paper thumbnail of White Cliffs

Research paper thumbnail of Caribbean women’s short fiction: New voices, emerging perspectives

Short Fiction in Theory & Practice, 2016

Research paper thumbnail of Home/lessness, Exile and Triangular Identities in the Drama of Caryl Phillips

Modern and Contemporary Black British Drama, 2015

Research paper thumbnail of Re-mapping Women’s Testimonies into Networked Subjectivities: TheQuipu Project

Advances in Gender Research, 2016

Research paper thumbnail of Black Women Subjects in Auto/biographical Discourse

The Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature (1945–2010), 2000

Research paper thumbnail of Gruesome and Yet Fascinating": Hidden, Disgraced and Disregarded Cultural Forms in Jamaican Short Fiction 1938-50

Journal of Caribbean Literatures, Mar 22, 2010

Research paper thumbnail of Unsettling the Centre: Black British Fiction

The History of British Women’s Writing, 1970-Present, 2015

Research paper thumbnail of Re-placing Wealth, Re-mapping Social Division: Kingston in the Fiction of Brian Meeks and Diana McCaulay

Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 2015

In this article I trace the geographies of poverty and wealth represented in two contemporary Jam... more In this article I trace the geographies of poverty and wealth represented in two contemporary Jamaican novels, Brian Meeks’s

Research paper thumbnail of The Embracing ‘I’: Mothers and Daughters in Contemporary Black Women's Auto/biography

Women: A Cultural Review, 2009

T the centre of the two texts focused on here, Yvonne Brewster's The Undertaker&#x27... more T the centre of the two texts focused on here, Yvonne Brewster's The Undertaker's Daughter: The Colourful Life of a Theatre Director and Jacqueline Walker's Pilgrim State, is a fractured yet self-defining relation-ship between the auto/biographical subject and her mother. ...

Research paper thumbnail of XVII * New Literatures

The Year's Work in English Studies, 2013

Research paper thumbnail of Chain reactions: Black women organising

Race & Class, 1985

The voices of Black women who have suffered because of racist and discriminatory practices in thi... more The voices of Black women who have suffered because of racist and discriminatory practices in this country speak on every page of this book, so in this chapter we have concentrated on our organised responses. We have always been active in our community: we began by ...

Research paper thumbnail of Lives Written in Fragments: The Self-Representational ‘I’ in Caribbean Diasporic Women's Auto/biography

Research paper thumbnail of Women's Life Writing and Diaspora

Research paper thumbnail of ‘she found a way, left the child’: ‘child-shifting’1 as the plantation's affects and love's paradox in Donna Hemans’ River Woman

Feminist Review, 2013

This article proposes a situated reading of maternal love, loss and lovelessness in Donna Hemans’... more This article proposes a situated reading of maternal love, loss and lovelessness in Donna Hemans’ novel River Woman, locating her text in relation to other contemporary Caribbean women writers and to the early fiction of Toni Morrison. I argue that the complex affects that her representation of ‘child-shifting’ produces, can be articulated both in relation to literary texts that re-imagine historical and contemporary practices leaving a child in order to save her, and in the context of the plantation, where ruptured ties at the level of community and culture continue to be reproduced in the personal, emotional and family spheres. I use the concept of marronage, developed in the work of Glissant and Depestre, to define strategies of survival that necessitated actual and imaginative flight or escape, to contextualise the complex affects of the plantation that are repeated and reproduced in the novel's present—the late twentieth-century Caribbean.

Research paper thumbnail of Affect and Gendered Creolisation

Feminist Review, 2013

104 affect and gendered creolisation This special issue draws on papers developed from the confer... more 104 affect and gendered creolisation This special issue draws on papers developed from the conference 'Caribbean Women's Writing: Comparative Critical Conversations', held at Goldsmiths, University of London, in June 2011 to address questions concerning the legacy of plantation culture in its shaping of a gendered creolisation. Notably, several of the papers struck a chord in their interrogation of the representation of affects in the literature of the region and its diaspora. From these presentations engaging the broad theme of affects and creolisation (used interchangeably), we asked contributors to consider further the insights that Creole or Caribbean textualisation affords in discussion of Caribbean lives, whether local or transnational, especially in terms of gendered bodily affectivity and the female body's capacity to act. That such consideration needs take account of 'silence engendered through a particular historical violence' (Anim-Addo, 2007: 9), that of slavery, its attendant 'resistance circles' (Brathwaite, 2000: 98) and some 'rewriting [of] the patriarchal contract' (Mohammed, 1995: 20), among other concerns, is central to the challenge of this debate.

Research paper thumbnail of ‘Let Me Tell You How it Really Was’: Authority, Legitimacy and Fictive Structures of Reality in Contemporary Black Women’s Autobiography

Changing English, 2010

Department of Arts, Media and English, University of the South Bank, London, UK Taylor and Franci... more Department of Arts, Media and English, University of the South Bank, London, UK Taylor and Francis CCEN_A_479244.sgm 10.1080/13586841003787225 Changing English 1358-684X (print)/1469-3585 (online) Original Article 2010Taylor & Francis 172000000June 2010 ...