Notions of Identity, Diaspora, and Gender in Caribbean Women's Writing


Book Description

Notions of Identity, Diaspora, and Gender in Caribbean Women's Writing uses a unique four-dimensional lens to frame questions of diaspora and gender in the writings of women from Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Haiti. These divergent and interconnected perspectives include violence, trauma, resistance, and expanded notions of Caribbean identity. In these writings, diaspora represents both a wound created by slavery and Indian indenture and the discursive praxis of defining new identities and cultural possibilities. These framings of identity provide inclusive and complex readings of transcultural Caribbean diasporas, especially in terms of gender and minority cultures.




Notions of Identity, Diaspora, and Gender in Caribbean Women's Writing


Book Description

Notions of Identity, Diaspora, and Gender in Caribbean Women's Writing uses a unique four-dimensional lens to frame questions of diaspora and gender in the writings of women from Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Haiti. These divergent and interconnected perspectives include violence, trauma, resistance, and expanded notions of Caribbean identity. In these writings, diaspora represents both a wound created by slavery and Indian indenture and the discursive praxis of defining new identities and cultural possibilities. These framings of identity provide inclusive and complex readings of transcultural Caribbean diasporas, especially in terms of gender and minority cultures.




Matria Redux


Book Description

In Matria Redux: Caribbean Women Novelize the Past, author Tegan Zimmerman contends that there is a need for reading Caribbean women’s texts relationally. This comprehensive study argues that the writer’s turn to maternal histories constitutes the definitive feature of this transcultural and transnational genre. Through an array of Caribbean women’s historical novels published roughly between 1980 and 2010, this book formulates the theory of matria—an imagined maternal space and time—as a postcolonial-psychoanalytic feminist framework for reading fictions of maternal history written by and about Caribbean women. Tracing the development of the historical novel in four periods of the Caribbean past—slavery, colonialism, revolution, and decolonization—this study argues that a pan-Caribbean generation of women writers, of varying discursive racial(ized) realities, has depicted similar matria constructs and maternal motifs. A politicized concept, matria functions in the historical novel as a counternarrative to traditional historical and literary discourses. Through close readings of the mother/daughter plots in contemporary Caribbean women’s historical fiction, such as Andrea Levy’s The Long Song, Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones, Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, and Marie-Elena John’s Unburnable, Matria Redux considers the concept of matria an important vehicle for postcolonial-psychoanalytic feminist literary resistance and political intervention. Matria as a psychoanalytic, postcolonial strategy therefore envisions, by returning to history, alternative feminist fictions, futures, and Caribbeans.




Teaching Anglophone Caribbean Literature


Book Description

This volume in the Options for Teaching series recognizes that the most challenging aspect of introducing students to anglophone Caribbean literature--the sheer variety of intellectual and artistic traditions in Western and non-Western cultures that relate to it--also offers the greatest opportunities to teachers. Courses on anglophone literature in the Caribbean can consider the region's specific histories and contexts even as they explore common issues: the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and colonial education; nationalism; exile and migration; identity and hybridity; class and racial conflict; gender and sexuality; religion and ritual. While considering how the availability of materials shapes syllabi, this volume recommends print, digital, and visual resources for teaching. The essays examine a host of topics, including the following: the development of multiethnic populations in the Caribbean and the role of various creole languages in the literature oral art forms, such as dub poetry and reggae music the influence of anglophone literature in the Caribbean on literary movements outside it, such as the Harlem Renaissance and black British writing Carnival religious rituals and beliefs specific genres such as slave narratives and autobiography film and drama the economics of rum Many essays list resources for further reading, and the volume concludes with a section of additional teaching resources.




The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edwidge Danticat


Book Description

Edwidge Danticat's prolific body of work has established her as one of the most important voices in 21st-century literary culture. Across such novels as Breath, Eyes, Memory, Farming the Bones and short story collections such as Krik? Krak! and most recently Everything Inside, essays, and writing for children, the Haitian-American writer has throughout her oeuvre tackled important contemporary themes including racism, imperialism, anti-immigrant politics, and sexual violence. With chapters written by leading and emerging international scholars, this is the most up-to-date and in-depth reference guide to 21st-century scholarship on Edwidge Danticat's work. The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edwidge Danticat covers such topics as: · The full range of Danticat's writing from her novels and short stories to essays, life writing and writing for children and young adults. · Major interdisciplinary scholarly perspectives including from establishing fields fields of literary studies, Caribbean Studies Political Science, Latin American Studies, feminist and gender studies, African Diaspora Studies, , and emerging fields such as Environmental Studies. · Danticat's literary sources and influences from Haitian authors such as Marie Chauvet, Jacques Roumain and Jacques-Stéphen Alexis to African American authors like Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Caribbean American writers Audre Lorde to Paule Marshall. · Known and unknown Historical moments in experiences of slavery and imperialism, the consequence of internal and external migration, and the formation of diasporic communities The book also includes a comprehensive bibliography of Danticat's work and key works of secondary criticism, and an interview with the author, as well as and essays by Danticat herself.




Transnational Narratives from the Caribbean


Book Description

This book offers a timely intervention in current debates on diaspora and diasporic identity by affirming the importance of narrative as a discursive mode to understand the human face of contemporary migrations and dislocations. Focusing on the Caribbean double-diaspora, Pulitano offers a close-reading of a range of popular works by four well-known writers currently living in the United States: Jamaica Kincaid, Michelle Cliff, Edwidge Danticat, and Caryl Phillips. Navigating the map of fictional characters, testimonial accounts, and autobiographical experiences, Pulitano draws attention to the lived experience of contemporary diasporic formations. The book offers a provocative re-thinking of socio-scientific analyses of diaspora by discussing the embodied experience of contemporary diasporic communities, drawing on disciplines such as Caribbean, Postcolonial, Diaspora, and Indigenous Studies along with theories on "border thinking" and coloniality/modernity. Contesting restrictive, national, and linguistic boundaries when discussing literature originating from the Caribbean, Pulitano situates the transnational location of Caribbean-born writers within current debates of Transnational American Studies and investigates the role of immigrant writers in discourses of race, ethnicity, citizenship, and belonging. Exploring the multifarious intersections between home, exile, migration and displacement, the book makes a significant contribution to memory and trauma studies, human rights debates, and international law, aiming at a wide range of scholars and specialized agents beyond the strictly literary circle. This volume affirms the humanity of personal stories and experiences against the invisibility of immigrant subjects in most theoretical accounts of diaspora and migration.




Dissident Writings of Arab Women


Book Description

Dissident Writings of Arab Women: Voices Against Violence analyzes the links between creative dissidence and inscriptions of violence in the writings of a selected group of postcolonial Arab women. The female authors destabilize essentialist framings of Arab identity through a series of reflective interrogations and "contesting" literary genres that include novels, short stories, poetry, docudramas, interviews and testimonials. Rejecting a purist "literature for literature’s sake" ethic, they embrace a dissident poetics of feminist critique and creative resistance as they engage in multiple and intergenerational border crossings in terms of geography, subject matter, language and transnationality. This book thus examines the ways in which the women’s writings provide the blueprint for social justice by "voicing" protest and stimulating critical thought, particularly in instances of social oppression, structural violence, and political transition. Providing an interdisciplinary approach which goes beyond narrow definitions of literature as aesthetic praxis to include literature’s added value as a social, historical, political, and cultural palimpsest, this book will be a useful resource for students and scholars of North African Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Francophone Studies, and Feminist Studies.




Re-theorising the Indian Subcontinental Diaspora


Book Description

It is estimated that more than 30 million people of Indian Subcontinental origin presently live outside their homeland. The present geo-political status of the Indian Subcontinental diaspora calls for more research and newer theorisation on how migrants from the Indian Subcontinent relocate, acculturate and renegotiate their identities in new host environments. This volume focuses on their historical, socio-cultural and economic patterns of migration and identity negotiation and formation within transnational discourses. While some of the chapters here focus on the nature of representations of the homeland and hostland in the works of Indian Subcontinental diasporic writers and film directors, others deal with the economic and historic aspects of the Indian Subcontinental diaspora. The book also includes chapters on women’s Kalapani crossings, liminal spaces, Anglo-Indian-Australian diaspora, Chinese-Indian-Canadian diaspora, and Indian Subcontinental-British home workers’ transnational space, ushering in a new era of diasporic identities.




Food, Text and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean


Book Description

How do diasporic writers negotiate their identities through and with food? What tensions emerge between the local and the global, between the foodways of the past and of the present? How are concepts of culinary ‘tradition’ and ‘authenticity’ articulated in Caribbean cookery writing? Drawing on a rich and varied tradition of Caribbean writings, Food, Text & Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean shows how the creation of food and the creation of narrative are intimately linked cultural practices which can tell us much about each other. Historically, Caribbean writers have explored, defined and re-affirmed their different cultural, ethnic, caste, class and gender identities by writing about what, when and how they eat. Images of feeding, feasting, fasting and other food rituals and practices, as articulated in a range of Caribbean writings, constitute a powerful force of social cohesion and cultural continuity. Moreover, food is often central to the question of what it means to be Caribbean, especially in diasporic and globalized contexts. Suitable for undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars, the book offers the first study of food and writing in an Anglophone Caribbean context.




Caribbean Food Cultures


Book Description

»Caribbean Food Cultures« approaches the matter of food from the perspectives of anthropology, sociology, cultural and literary studies. Its strong interdisciplinary focus provides new insights into symbolic and material food practices beyond eating, drinking, cooking, or etiquette. The contributors discuss culinary aesthetics and neo/colonial gazes on the Caribbean in literary documents, audiovisual media, and popular images. They investigate the negotiation of communities and identities through the preparation, consumption, and commodification of »authentic« food. Furthermore, the authors emphasize the influence of underlying socioeconomic power relations for the reinvention of Caribbean and Western identities in the wake of migration and transnationalism. The anthology features contributions by renowned scholars such as Rita De Maeseneer and Fabio Parasecoli who read Hispano-Caribbean literatures and popular culture through the lens of food studies.