"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)
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
233 p, Contents: Introduction. "Out of Many, One": A Case of Multiple Childhoods -- I. "The Ending Up Is the Starting Out": The Bildungsroman Re/formed -- II. "Behold the Great Image of Authority": African West Indian Male Initiation -- III. "His Great Struggle Beginning": African American Male Initiation -- IV. Womanish Girls: African American Female Initiation -- V. Journeys to Selfhood: African West Indian Female Initiation -- Conclusion. Ten Is the Age of Darkness -- Chronology of the African American Bildungsroman -- Chronology of the African West Indian Bildungsroman
