Decolonial Poetics and Queer Resistance in Anglophone Afro-Caribbean Women’s Literature (original) (raw)

Anglophone Caribbean literature written by Black women writers across the diaspora in the 1980s emerges as a transformative, genre-bending, and defiant force. This period of Caribbean literature can be described as a period of transition that reflects the contradictory experiences of postcolonial island-nations grappling with governance, migration, failed and uneven development, and the unfinished (failed) project of decolonization. Caribbean writers located inside and outside the region have long taken up the challenge of representing and affirming the complexity of the region's histories, languages, stories, myths, cultures, and identities. Caribbean women writers during this period addressed this project through multiple genresnovels, poetry, essays, and playsand paid careful needed attention to the lives of women who countered the male-dominated Caribbean literary canon of the 1920s to 1970s (namely,