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.
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.
Hutchinson,George (Editor) and Young,John K. (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2013
Published:
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
236 p., Always haunted by the commodification of blackness, African American literary production interfaces with the processes of publication and distribution in particularly charged ways. This collection ranges across the history of African American literature, and the authors have much to contribute on such issues as editorial and archival preservation, canonization, and the "packaging" and repackaging of black-authored texts. Includes "More than McKay and Guillén: The Caribbean in Hughes and Bontemps's The Poetry of the Negro (1949)."
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.
203 p., Examines the presence of slave vocality in Black Atlantic literature, placing the North American tradition of slave narrative against works from authors throughout the United States and the Caribbean. Challenges existing approaches to slave narrative by viewing the genre as one based on the fundamental impossibility of expressing black subjectivity under the political, ethical, and psychic conditions of slavery. The slave narrative thus ceases to represent an attempt by former slaves to access freedom and agency through writing, along with its promises of reason and autonomy, but rather signals (or sounds) a process of expression built not upon meaning, but upon signification. In other words, rather than crafting themselves into legible objects for the sake of narration and perception, slave narrators performed their roles as exchangeable units, both discursive and political, in ways that exposed the underlying lacunae of being a slave-narrator, a significative protocol that persists in contemporary black fiction throughout the Atlantic, even in areas in which the slave narrative did not historically emerge.
Explores the representation of older women in Afro-Caribbean Canadian literature, with a particular focus on depictions of mothering. Details on lesbian identity in Afro-Caribbean Canadian women's writings are also presented.
