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.
220 p., Employs a black feminist diaspora literary lens to identify, define, trace, and speak to the African Diaspora as it functions in black women's diaspora fiction and informs our understanding of black women's diaspora identity. Considers three authors and novels by women of, in, and across the African Diaspora. The study centers on Sandra Jackson-Opoku's The River Where Blood Is Born as a primary site of analysis of diaspora formation and theorization, Dionne Brand's At the Full and Change of the Moon and Maryse Condé's Desirada as comparative textual and theoretical sites.
Place of publication not identified: CayStreet Publications
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
164 p., Topics include George Town In the 50's and 60's, The Wights and McTaggarts as the owners of Cayman’s First Supermarket who were pioneers of keeping Caymanian young people employed, Miss Kippy School in George Town, Cayman Prep and Rev.George Hicks, Cayman High and Rev. John R. Gray, Aunt Ione's Fried Fish, Church Girls, Ghosts and Rolling Calf, Dating in the 60's,The Flag Carrier, Cayman Bruce Lee, C.H. Goring and Barbadians in Cayman, A Cayman Summer, and 50’s Christmas in Cayman.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
237 p., A close reading of three works by female authors. Presents a trajectory, covering different epochs from post emancipation, independence, and the contemporary, of their portrayal of subalterns, the specific strategies they use to reveal their protagonists' resistance, growth and self-affirmation.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
111 p, Examines the ways Guadeloupean women writers Maryse Conde, Simone Schwarz-Bart and Myriam Warner-Vieyra demystify the theme of the return to Africa as opposed to the masculinist version by Negritude male writers from the 1930s to 1960s. Negritude, a cultural and literary movement, drew much of its strength from the idea of a mythical or cultural reconnection with the African past allegorized as a mother figure. In contrast these women writers, of the post-colonial era who are to large extent heirs of Negritude, differ sharply from their male counterparts in their representation of Africa. In their novels, the continent is not represented as a propitious mother figure but a disappointing father figure.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
150 p., Contents: Postcolonial Caribbean women's fiction : a revisionist discourse
Caribbean women's literature in the post independence era Beka Lamb : a look at "befo' time Crick crack, monkey : "when monkey caan see'e own tail" Angel : "light the way for us!" Traversing thresholds.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
318 p., In the late 20th century, Toni Cade Bambara, Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor, Ntozake Shange, and Toni Morrison reclaim and revise cultural nationalism. The author devotes a chapter to each author. Organizing, formally on the page and thematically in the story, heals the fractured single and communal bodies in Bambara's 1980 novel The Salt Eaters. On the islands of Tatem and Carriacou, Marshall's Avey Johnson dances a cultural nation dependent on diasporic connections in Praisesong for the Widow (1983). Naylor's Willow Springs proves fertile island ground in Mama Day (1988) for women's work to map nation, unearth an archive, and mother the next generation. Shange's recipe-laden novel Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982) and later cookbook if I can Cook/you Know God can (1998) posit cooking as theory and practice of community. In Morrison's Paradise (1997), women write and paint records of their individual and collective histories. This group of writers uses Africa, the Sea Islands, the Caribbean, the American South, the kitchen, the dance floor, and the garden as spaces that help define a distinctly African American collectivity practiced in highly local, concrete work for fashioning self and community. In these practices, cultural nationalism comes to rely not on the imagined and far away, but on the lived and local.
