Beyond Miranda's Meanings": Contemporary Critical Perspectives on Caribbean Women's Literatures (original) (raw)
Stories in Caribbean Feminism: Reflections on the Twentieth Century
Written and delivered as the Fifth Anniversary Public Lecture of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, this paper explores first hand lived anecdotes of incidents and ideas that make up the history of Caribbean feminism in the twentieth century
Ideas:Journal of English Literary Studies, 2021
In A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being, Kaiama L. Glover explores questions of race and gender in the geo-cultural space of the Caribbean and its diasporas. She engages with works of Caribbean fiction within the canon of the marginal. She examines the work of Marie Chauvet, Maryse Condé, René Depestre, Marlon James, and Jamaica Kincaid, authors who have been relegated to the eccentric margins of a periphery, the periphery being the literature of French-speaking America. Glover is interested in the question of how centres and margins have been displaced inward even to those Haitian women that have been more marginal to more dominant centres. The main premises of the book are texts at the intersection of blackness, womanhood, and the community desire or desire of a given community.
Introduction: Women and Gender: Looking Toward "Caribbeanness
Journal of international women's studies, 2016
In this special issue of the JIWS, fourteen authors explore varying iterations of "Caribbeanness" and what it means to identify its specific cultural unity through diversity in literature, various forms of activism, and constructions of feminism, identity, femininity, masculinity, and sexuality. In the closing essay of his seminal Caribbean Discourse, Edouard Glissant distinguishes between the identification of Caribbeanness as both a dream and a reality; "The notion of antillanite, or Caribbeanness, emerges from a reality that we will have to question, but also corresponds to a dream that we must clarify and whose legitimacy must be demonstrated" (Glissant 221). As the just late Jamaican poet, novelist, and essayist Michelle Cliff, who lived in Jamaica and the US wrote, "Caribbeanness as a concept cannot be narrowed down to a particular space" and thus any clarification of the term must move beyond the physical geography of the region into the diaspora...
Decolonizing Feminism: The Home-Grown Roots of Caribbean Women's Movement
1997
in these times of increased interest in Caribbean women -ideal canvases, it would appear, on which to theorize on the postfeminist, postcolonial, chaos-driven societ ies of the twentieth century-to speak of our history, our literature, the quality of our feminism or lack thereof, as if we con st ituted a homogeneous block, an undivided, unfragmented and unfragment able ent ity-knowable, understandable, whole. Caribbean feminism is often discussed in much the same way,as something graspable, perceptible, complete -perhaps different from u.s. and European variables but nonetheless compre hensible, unequivocal. Reference is often made in these discussions to the race and class differences that separate women in Caribbean societies, most often in a perfunctory aside about not assuming that the discussion that has preceded it appl ies to all women in the region. But these denials can be rather elliptical, ma naging nonetheless to infer th at one could after all continue to seek to un dersta nd all Caribbean women through what they share with other women as wome n if we only remi nd our audie nces that the differe nces allow, like political polls, for plus or minus three percentage points of error.
Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought
2016
Aims of the Series New Caribbean Studies series seeks to contribute to Caribbean selfunderstanding, to intervene in the terms of global engagement with the region, and to extend Caribbean Studies' role in reinventing various disciplines and their methodologies well beyond the Caribbean. The series especially solicits humanities-informed and interdisciplinary scholarship from across the region's language traditions.
Introduction: “The Unexpected Caribbean” Part II
Women, Gender, and Families of Color, 2021
When conceptualizing "The Unexpected Caribbean" special issue for the journal of Women, Gender, and Families of Color, we, as editors, sought to contest many of the stereotypical visualizations of the Caribbean and its diasporas and highlight some of the unexpected counternarratives and innovations in representation that appear in literature, the arts, and society. Focusing on women, gender, and families allowed us to consider how Caribbean women-typically disempowered by the restrictions of the colonial and patriarchal systems in which they have lived-have risen to the forefront of making change in their communities and cultures. We strove to emphasize the numerous roles and contributions of women in the circum-Caribbeanboth past and present-and how a variety of configurations of gender and issues pertaining to family wrestle with notions of "Otherness, " regardless of time or space. We therefore called for essays that countered neo/colonial conscriptions of the Caribbean as a destination for tourists; or as a region needing "saving" by foreign business investors, missionaries, environmental groups, and other types of not-for-profit organizations; or as a site for the consumption or extraction of laborers (including sex workers), natural resources, and cultures. As we argued in the introduction to the spring 2021 issue, far from being exotic and isolated islands suitable only as vacation locales or spaces of dire poverty where natural disasters and epidemiological crises repeatedly strike, Caribbean societies have long been realms of incredible intellectual and artistic production and political resistance. The articles gathered for that first issue testify to the fact: novelist Apricot Irving, who spent years of her childhood in Haiti as the daughter of missionaries, contested
Cathexis, Catharsis, and the Challenge to Contemporary Caribbean Feminist Theorizing
2013
For decades, Caribbean feminist and gender scholars have been dissatisfied with unequal North-South discursive exchanges, an osmotic process Eudine Barriteau defines as “imported theoretical constructs that did not stimulate critiques of epistemologies, methodologies and practices, and [sic] therefore reinforced and maintained exclusions and invisibility around key dimensions of women‟s lives” (Barriteau 2003, 3). Conversely, Patricia Mohammed seeks to subvert “the artists and architects of colonisation [who] attempted to achieve opacity [of Caribbean self-imaging] by overlays of the same tone in order to obliterate cultures” (373).