An essay is presented on the relationship between black U.S. feminist literature celebrating author Zora Neale Hurston and U.S.-Caribbean cultural linkages, and the U.S. invasion of the Caribbean during the 1980s. According to the author, black feminists' attempts to reclaim the Caribbean through Hurston contributed to a neoliberal vision of the Caribbean which excluded Grenadian revolutionaries. Grenadian government debt and depictions of the Caribbean in popular culture are discussed.
Reads Carnival-related performances in relationship to the colonial and national histories of the circulation of Indian and black women's bodies in Trinidad and Tobago, asking what is at stake in these occupations of genre, form, and performative presence in the latest global scenes of late capitalism (where image and sound, as cultural productions, are always in circulation beyond the scope of the nation, and their own "original" referents).
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.
Considers the meaning of feminism in Latin America and the Caribbean. According to the Methodological and Thematic Commission of the 12th Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Meeting, the event presents an opportunity to explore the routes that will enable feminism to move forward. Decribes feminism in the Latin American and Caribbean regions as plural and diverse.
In 1815, two benevolent organizations commenced operation in Antigua, the Female Refuge Society based in English Harbour and the Distressed Females' Friend Society based in St John's. The organizations were run on principle by women and the executive committees were multi-racial. The annual reports of the Female Refuge Society had a profound impact on the direction "of female anti-slavery activism in Britain.
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.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
226 p., Argues that a repeated engagement with the Caribbean’s iconic and historic touchstones offers a new sense of (inter)national belonging that brings an alternative and dynamic vision to the gendered legacy of brutality against black bodies, flesh, and bone. Using a distinctive methodology she calls "feminist rehearsal" to chart the Caribbean’s multiple and contradictory accounts of historical events, the author highlights the gendered and emergent connections between art, history, and belonging.
Reviews the book "Women's Activism in Latin America and the Caribbean: Engendering Social Justice, Democratizing Citizenship," edited by Elizabeth Maier and Nathalie Lebon.
Offers close readings of three texts that foreground the problems, possibilities and struggle involved in forging affective connections across difference between women: Kate Clanchy,What is She Doing Here?, 2008, Jamaica Kincaid,Lucy, 1991a and Marlene Van Niekerk, ‘Labour’, 2004. Argues that the incomplete and partial nature of affective moments represented in these texts signals possibilities for a cautiously redefined idea of affective feminist solidarity as it is mobilized in the intimacy of domestic spaces.
