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.
The findings of a questionnaire survey distributed to 153 female university students in Barbados and Jamaica in 2008 reveal the attitudes to diverse female sexualities in the Caribbean. The participants in the survey discussed changing beliefs about sexuality in Caribbean society. The findings show that slowly, as a consequence of globalization and the mass media, people are increasingly open-minded about sex. Women are confidently expressing and increasingly asserting themselves as equal partners. There is greater debate in Caribbean society about female same-sex relationships, and deeper awareness of sexual harassment is evident. Nevertheless, for some respondents, the same degrading notions of women as sex objects and promiscuous beings continue to exist.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
218 p., Based on ten years of research, Economies of Desire is the first ethnographic study to examine the erotic underpinnings of transnational tourism. It offers startling insights into the commingling of sex, intimacy, and market forces in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, two nations where tourism has had widespread effects. In her multi-layered analyses, Amalia Cabezas reconceptualizes our understandings of informal economies (particularly "affective economies"), "sex workers," and "sexual tourism," and she helps us appreciate how money, sex and love are intertwined within the structure of globalizing capitalism.
Byfield,Judith A. (Editor), Denzer,LaRay (Editor), and Morrison,Anthea (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2009
Published:
Bloomington: Indiana University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Selected papers from an international conference, "Gendering the Diaspora: Women, Culture, and Historical Change in the Caribbean and the Nigerian Hinterland" held at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., Nov. 2002., 329 p.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
211 p., Surveying three novels written by writers of diasporic literature -- Zadie Smith's White Teeth, Jessica Hagedorns's Dogeaters, and Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven, the dissertation discusses how these novels function as narratives and provide cognitive maps which help us re-conceptualize social and political structures and women's places within them.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
232p., Using a unique four-dimensional lens to frame questions of diaspora in the writings of women from Haiti, Martinique, and Guadeloupe, Mehta expands notions of Caribbean identity.
Findings indicated the common denominators for African, African American, and Caribbean women regarding breast cancer are that (1) they present at younger ages, (2) they present having advanced-stage tumors, (3) they are often from lower socioeconomic levels, and (4) they lack knowledge regarding causes and treatment of breast cancer.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
208 p., Analyzes literary representation of the island in Caribbean women's literature as a key component of the gendered construction of diasporic identity. This book centers on the representations of the island - whether in Anglophone, Hispanophone, or Francophone Caribbean literature - and the inherent contradictions they raise.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
An edited collection of essays mainly from the 10th anniversary meeting of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars, which was held in 2006., 434 p.
363 p., investigates the pre- and post- migratory experiences of working-class African-Caribbean women from the English-speaking Caribbean who left their children in their home countries while pursuing better economic opportunities in Canada from the 1970s to the early 1990s. The author problematizes the intersectional relationship between female migrant labor, transnationality and motherhood within the rubric of globalized gender, race and class relations. Given the centrality of African-Caribbean women's worker-mother role in their societies, further exploration of this role within global migration is important in order to recognize its significant gendered impact on women's labor and familial relations on a transnational level.
Gafaïti,Hafid (Author), Lorcin,Patricia M. E. (Author), and Troyansky,David G. (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2009
Published:
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
460 p, Includes Joseph Militello's "Madwoman in the Senegalese Muslim attic: reading Myriam Warner-Vieyra's Juletane and Mariama Bâ's Un chant écarlate"
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.
