268 p., This study used a Black feminist critical framework to examine the conditions that influence the production of black women's fiction during the postwar era (1945-60). The novels of Ann Petry, Dorothy West and Paule Marshall were studied as artifacts that were shaped by the cultural and political climate of this crucial period in American history. A survey was also conducted of their associations with members and organizations in the American Left to determine what impact their social activism had on their lives and art. It was determined that these writers' political engagement played a significant role in the creation of transformative narratives about the power of black women to resist oppression in all of its forms. As a consequence of their contribution to a rich black feminist literary tradition, these postwar black women fiction writers serve as important foremothers to later generations of black women artists.
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.
494 p., Analyzes representational problems of black resistance and solidarity in the neoliberal age focusing on transnational black female protagonists in works by Paule Marshall, Jamaica Kincaid, and Michelle Cliff. Considers how they are imagined to resist and assist U.S.-Caribbean relations of trade, labor, and development.
Analyzes the prominent role played by first wave feminism and by women writers between 1898-1903 as the Jamaica Times articulated a broad-based, middle class nationalism and launched a campaign to establish a Jamaican national literature. This archival material is significant because it suggests a significant modification of anglophone Caribbean feminist, literary and nationalist historiography: first wave feminism was not introduced to Jamaica exclusively through black nationalist organizations in the late 19th and early 20th century, but emerged in a broader phenomenon of respectable, middle class nationalism encompassing Jamaican nationalism and Pan Africanism.
