An essay is presented on the relationship between black U.S. feminist literature celebrating author Zora Neale Hurston and U.S.-Caribbean cultural linkages, and the U.S. invasion of the Caribbean during the 1980s. According to the author, black feminists' attempts to reclaim the Caribbean through Hurston contributed to a neoliberal vision of the Caribbean which excluded Grenadian revolutionaries. Grenadian government debt and depictions of the Caribbean in popular culture are discussed.
Dionne Brand's memoir, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, touches on the author's childhood in Trinidad and adulthood in Canada but is equally concerned with understanding and intervening in the larger histories among which Brand situates her identity. Her sources are rich and varied, and they can be broken down into three general types: the historical archives written during the 'age of exploration' and the slave trade; the contemporary archives of newspapers and journals; and the creative archive of postcolonial writers, or the neo-archive.
"Although Annie John is commonly categorized as primarily Caribbean (a precursor to Kincaid’s “American” sequel, Lucy [1990]), my proposed comparison elucidates the Western and transnational leanings of this foundational “Caribbean” work and the ways in which it implicitly expands on Morrison’s representations of female autonomy and visual culture." --The Author
