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.
220 p., Employs a black feminist diaspora literary lens to identify, define, trace, and speak to the African Diaspora as it functions in black women's diaspora fiction and informs our understanding of black women's diaspora identity. Considers three authors and novels by women of, in, and across the African Diaspora. The study centers on Sandra Jackson-Opoku's The River Where Blood Is Born as a primary site of analysis of diaspora formation and theorization, Dionne Brand's At the Full and Change of the Moon and Maryse Condé's Desirada as comparative textual and theoretical sites.
Place of publication not identified: CayStreet Publications
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
164 p., Topics include George Town In the 50's and 60's, The Wights and McTaggarts as the owners of Cayman’s First Supermarket who were pioneers of keeping Caymanian young people employed, Miss Kippy School in George Town, Cayman Prep and Rev.George Hicks, Cayman High and Rev. John R. Gray, Aunt Ione's Fried Fish, Church Girls, Ghosts and Rolling Calf, Dating in the 60's,The Flag Carrier, Cayman Bruce Lee, C.H. Goring and Barbadians in Cayman, A Cayman Summer, and 50’s Christmas in Cayman.
Conde,Maryse (Author) and Richard Philcox (Translator)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2000
Published:
New York: Soho
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
260 p., Desirada is the story of Marie-Noelle and her quest to understand the mother who abandoned her and to discover the identity of her father. It is also the story of generations of island women and the pursuit of a meaningful life despite a tainted personal history.
241 p., Explores the power children realize in the past, present, and future from their real or imagined connections to their absent mothers in twentieth- and twenty-first-century African diasporic women's fiction, science fiction, and film. Much of the existing scholarship on the diasporic mother focuses on her place in history, yet texts by Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Gayl Jones, Octavia E. Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, Sheree Renée Thomas, Nisi Shawl, and Julie Dash suggest through their depictions of the lasting links children create with their mothers that the power of the diasporic mother and, by proxy, the black family and community extends into the future.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
237 p., A close reading of three works by female authors. Presents a trajectory, covering different epochs from post emancipation, independence, and the contemporary, of their portrayal of subalterns, the specific strategies they use to reveal their protagonists' resistance, growth and self-affirmation.
Esteves,Carmen C. (Author) and Paravisini-Gebert,Lizabeth (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
1991
Published:
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
273 p, Contents: Tétiyette and the devil / Anonymous (Guadeloupe) -- Little Cog-burt / Phyllis Shand Allfrey (Dominica) -- Cotton Candy / Dora Alonso (Cuba) -- See me in me Benz and t'ing : like the lady who lived on that isle remote / Hazel D. Campbell (Jamaica) -- They called her Aurora (a passion for Donna Summer) / Aida Cartagena Portalatín (Dominican Republic) -- Columba / Michelle Cliff (Jamaica) -- A pottage of lentils / Marie-Thérèse Colimon-Hall (Haiti) -- Three women in Manhattan / Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe) -- Hair / Hilma Contreras (Dominican Republic) -- Piano-bar / Liliane Dévieux (Haiti) -- Barred : Trinidad 1987 / Ramabai Espinet (Trinidad) -- The poisoned story / Rosario Ferré (Puerto Rico) -- Cocuyo Flower / Magali García Ramis (Puerto Rico) -- How to gather the shadows of the flowers / Ángela Hernández (Dominican Republic) -- Opéra Station. Six in the evening. For months-- / Jeanne Hyvrard (Martinique/France) -- Girl / Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua) -- No dust is allowed in this house / Olga Nolla (Puerto Rico) -- Widow's walk / Opal Palmer Adisa (Jamaica) -- Parable II / Velma Pollard (Jamaica) -- Red flower / Paulette Poujol-Oriol (Haiti) -- The day they burned the books / Jean Rhys (Dominica) -- Lola or the song of spring / Astrid Roemer (Surinam) -- Brights Thursdays / Olive Senior (Jamaica) -- ADJ, Inc. / Ana Lydia Vega (Puerto Rico) -- Of nuns and punishments / Bea Vianen (Surinam) -- Passport to paradise / Myriam Warner-Vieyra (Guadeloupe) -- Of natural causes / Mirta Yáñez (Cuba)
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
247 p, Set in both Toronto and the Caribbean, this novel gives voice to the power of love and belonging in a story of two women, profoundly different, each in her own spiritual exile.
Allende,Isabel (Author) and Peden,Margaret Sayers (Translator)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2010
Published:
New York: Harper
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
457 p, The story of a mulatta woman, a slave and concubine, determined to take control of her own destiny in a society where that would seem impossible
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
199 p, "At the center of Jamaican-born Michelle, Cliff's novels is the exploration of the interplay between memory and history. Noraida Agosto examines Cliff's representation of memory as the part of history that has been suppressed because of its revolutionary potential. Memories of slave rebellions, for instance, were erased through omission from official historical accounts to discourage resistance among slaves. Cliff's novels are an attempt to recover these erased memories, which could generate resistance to modern oppressions. This recovery of devalued memories also entails a validation of non-elite beliefs, languages, and art forms in order to debunk dominant practices." (Book jacket);
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
462 p., On a Caribbean island in the 1950s, elderly Mary Gertrude Mathilda commits murder. As she explains herself to police, her story exposes the ugly underbelly of life on Caribbean plantations, with its slavery and brutality.
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.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
104 p., She Sex could rightly be regarded as a trailblazing, transformative work, concerned with showcasing the innermost erotic stories of Caribbean Women.
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:
126 p, Contents: The book is organized as a series of essays on related topics all applied to Caribbean women's fiction: white women writers; madness; postcolonial theory, female subjectivity, Bakhtin's Carnival image; ideology (Elaine Savory)
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.
