Decolonial Poetics and Queer Resistance in Anglophone Afro-Caribbean Women’s Literature (original) (raw)
Related papers
Notions of Identity, Diaspora, and Gender in Caribbean Women's Writing
Contemporary Women's Writing, 2011
Martinique. Her analysis is framed by what she calls the ''divergent and interconnected modalities'' of violence, trauma, resistance, and expanded notions of identity (6). These texts provide a lens for Mehta to focus on the brutal and bloody horrors of the colonial past. She confronts the abjections of slavery in full force in her profoundly disturbing and detailed examination of the dynamics of torture, violence, and sexual abuse. The colonized body is also depicted as a source of resistance through African-rooted dancing, healing and poisoning, infanticide, seduction, and the manipulation of whites. The novels' literary protagonists, disenfranchised by class, gender, and racial positioning, seek to balm the scars of colonialism as they search for a grounded identity in a hostile environment, be it on their islands of birth or in exile. Through curative narratives and ''creative dissidence,'' Mehta demonstrates how these writers negotiate new Caribbean subjectivities in homelands marred by corruption and patriarchy and amongst the indifference and prejudices of the French metropolis. Mehta carefully historically contextualizes each novel and pays keen attention to the cultural, social, and political climate in which it was produced. These writers are from unique socio-political situations that both differentiate them and bind them together. Both Martinique and Guadeloupe are still overseas departments of France and have arguably yet to escape the shackles of colonialism, while Haiti, the first Caribbean island to achieve independence, has suffered at the hands of brutal dictators and their henchmen, leaving the population traumatized. As the scars of colonial and postcolonial oppression are still fresh on the islands' inhabitants,
2012
My article will take issue with some of the scholarship on current and prospective configurations of the Caribbean and, in more general terms, postcolonial literary criticism. It will give an account of the turn-of-the century debates about literary value and critical practice and analyze how contemporary fiction by Caribbean female writers responds to the socioeconomic reality that came into being with the rise of globalization and neo-liberalism. I will use David Scott's thought provoking study-Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (1999)-to outline the history of the Caribbean literary discourse and to try to rethink the strategic goals of postcolonial criticism.
On the Threshold of Becoming: Contemporary Caribbean Women Writers
1997
I N SETTING O UT TO STUDY the w ork of contemp o ra ry Ca r ib bea n women w riters, it w oul d be helpful to co nsid er t he cri tical framework that enters d iscussions of the w riting of a utho rs who are both w omen a nd Carib bea n . The p r evalent cri tical p erspective on Caribbean literatu re demand s that it shed Eurocen tri c views and stress se lf-determination. Thus, the ma in themes of Car ib bean liter atu r e (rootlessness, the d efinitio n of a Ca r ib bean aesthet ic, race and colo r, decolonization of culture a nd la ng uage) are lin ked to the Ca ribb ea n writers' p re scribe d rol e of articulating the need for a ch a nge in d ire c tion. Likewise, the p r evalent feminist persp ective on women's w r iting dem ands that it shed male-centered views a nd stress female self determination. Wo me n 's w r iting sh ould show fem al e character s in th e process of emancip ation fro m patriarchal in stit ution s and values, a nd poin t the way towards sim ilar emancipat ion ou tside of fic tion .
Anglophone Caribbean Women Writers
1984
Of Course When They Ask for Poems About the "Realities" of Black Women' This serial is available in Kunapipi: https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol16/iss1/109 Anglophone Caribbean Women Writers 625 11. l am grateful to the cultural researcher, Esi Sutherland Addy, whom I interviewed, for this information on women's activities in the churches and as performers drawing on Ghananian cultural traditions. 12. In Kenya, Muthoni I<arega of Phoenix publishers, a participant, and Dr. Wanjiku Kabira of Nairobi University, organiser of the women's workshop, talked to me about its aims and the way it was conducted. 13. Marjorie Oludhe-Macgoye: 'Mathenge,' The Heinemann Book of African Poetry in English, selected by A. Maja-Pearce (Heinemann, 1990), p. 19. DENISE deCAIRES NARAIN and EVELYN O'CALLAGHAN Anglophone Caribbean Women Writers. 'Of Course When They Ask for Poems About the "Realities" of Black Women' What they really want at times is a ...
Vol. 3: Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1970s-2015 edited by Prof. Ronald Cummings (Brock University, Canada) & Prof. Alison Donnell (University of East Anglia, UK), 2019
The Caribbean and Britain Writing by second generation Caribbean migrants is deeply marked by issues of un/belonging to the national project and characterised by a generational shift in terms of articulating cultural affiliations and attachments to both the Caribbean and Britain. Writers engage with blackness as a political signifier and a rallying point for all non-white ethnicities in Britain that can be empowering in terms of claiming a place and identity within the experience and history of Britishness. Caribbean and black British literatures in the UK generally offer a different and revisionary perspective on British history and diasporic communities by bringing attention to the Brixton riots (Alex Wheatle’s Brixton Rock, 1999), the New Cross Massacre (LKJ’s poetry and John LaRose’s The New Cross Massacre Story) or multicultural experience in the city (Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, 2000), as well as much deeper and longer histories of a Caribbean presence in the UK which can struggle to be acknowledged. Alongside the urgency of contesting racism, these narratives also articulate intersectional identities informed by class, gender and sexuality as it is experienced within and across the UK & the Caribbean. Like diasporic literature in the US and Canada, contemporary black British literature is very much connected, conceptually and poetically, with Caribbean literature and that of the larger diaspora and therefore merits special critical attention as constitutive of it.