Inescapable Entanglements: Notes on Caribbean Feminist Engagement (original) (raw)
Introduction It is an incredible honour to have been invited to share this twentieth birthday of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies. I would like to thank the faculty, staff and students for their amazing warmth and hospitality. Let me take this opportunity to also recognize Professor Barbara Bailey, whose commitment to gender equality is manifested not just in her contribution as Regional Coordinator of the IGDS, but in the work she has accomplished nationally, regionally and internationally. In particular, Professor Bailey’s commitment to education and the foundational texts in Caribbean Gender Studies that she has co-authored/coedited are an amazing legacy for generations of scholars to come. We know that the IGDS was a dimension of women’s and feminist activism in the Caribbean, from WAND to CAFRA, from Sistren to NUDE. We had taken our struggle to the academy, making these institutional spaces the site of our demands for recognition. Today the IGDS boasts a regional programme with a superb publication record, training undergraduate and graduate students, initiating collaborations with academic partners and communities. It extends itself to wider communities, whether it is the open access feminist journal at St Augustine, the work at Mona with Haitian colleagues after the earthquake to develop a certificate programme in Gender Studies, or the Summer Institute in Gender Studies at Cave Hill which brings together university students, farmers, civil servants, community activists and police officers from across the region.
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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...
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