Analyses the feminist content of Afra-Hispanic literature written by Black Spanish-speaking women of the Caribbean and the Central and South America. Reconstruction of discursive tradition of Afra-Hispanic literature through archaeology; Presence of literate Afra-Hispanic writers during the slavery era; Prominence of Afra-Hispanic writers Nancy Morejon and Aida Cartagena Portalatin.
"Recent West Indian literature by women offers a locus of debate over the retrieval of the body from and within western discursive erasure. This erasure of the female body and its possible reclamation is of course central to contemporary feminist debate, and has its own genealogy within feminist discourse. My interest in this question, however, is in the ways in which colonialism's discursive and institutional apparatuses obliterated and continue to obliterate the colonised (specifically female) body, and the counter-colonial strategies by which this 'lost' body might be reclaimed. In their fiction Erna Brodber and Jamaica Kincaid anatomize the body's erasure under a colonialist scriptive drive and explore potentials for the re/cognition of corporeality and sexuality." (author)
The erasure and denial of the female body and of female sexuality in the fiction of Erna Brodber and Jamaica Kincaid represent the erasure and denial of the colonized Caribbeans by their European colonizers. The female characters of both Brodber and Kincaid, however, retrieve their bodies through various means, from education to a realization of the power of their sexuality. This retrieval of the female body symbolizes freedom of the Caribbean body from colonization.
