Proposes a reading of Donna Hemans' novel River Woman in relation to other contemporary Caribbean women writers and to the early fiction of Toni Morrison. Argues that the complex affects that her representation of 'child-shifting' produces can be articulated in relation to literary texts that re-imagine historical and contemporary practices leaving a child in order to save her and in the context of the plantation.
Looks at the performance of tomboy identity in Joan Anim-Addo's collection of poetry Janie, Cricketing Lady and Margaret Cezair-Thompson's novel The Pirate's Daughter. Argues that the ongoing affects of colonialism and patriarchy in the islands of Grenada and Jamaica, shape the life narratives. To understand the way in which affect can be expressed through tomboyism in Caribbean societies, it is necessary to look at color and class alongside gender in the context of Caribbean creolization.
Caribbean women writers such as Erna Brodber and Opal Palmer Adisa often include men in women's liberatory quests as participants. The close connection between sexuality and emotions in this body of writing can be read through a new model of affective feminist reader theory. Women's sexual healing processes in the novels discussed in this article are not solely gynocentric in the Caribbean context: men are often active participants in these processes, and thus also in gender reconfigurations.
Draws on two Caribbean texts, Anim-Addo's Imoinda: Or She Who will Lose Her Name and Philip's Zong!. Discusses how these two Caribbean texts counterwrite the history of the slave plantation by staging and embodying the work of an affective memory drawn from the history of the black subject as a history of being and community.
