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.
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.
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.
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
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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.
Examines the role of abolitionist and feminist ideals in Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda's novel Sab. Highlights the power and gender relations in Sab, suggesting that previous interpretations of the novel have not addressed the role of these relations as a function of race relations in the slave colony of Cuba. Discusses the themes of interracial relationships and personal identity.;
242 p., As a feminist approach which takes into consideration how gender collides with race, national origin, and class in the context of neo-colonial imperialisms, transnational feminist studies attempt to bridge the gap left by these theories that either look at gender or at race. This dissertation examines the work of Dionne Brand, Marlene Nourbese Philip, and Makeda Silvera in the light of these recent transnational feminist developments. By insisting on a fluid and multiply positioned self, these writers enact a transnational feminist identity that repudiates simplistic notions of gender oppression at the same time as it challenges masculinist notions of home.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
223 p, Ileana Rodriguez's House/Garden/Nation: Space, Gender, and Ethnicity in Post-Colonial Latin American Literatures by Women offers an insightful look into the role the feminine has played in the constructions of nation and nationalism in critical moments of Latin American history. Although feminism is at the center of the study, it is always predicated by concerns of ethnicity and social class. (BNET);
494 p., Analyzes representational problems of black resistance and solidarity in the neoliberal age focusing on transnational black female protagonists in works by Paule Marshall, Jamaica Kincaid, and Michelle Cliff. Considers how they are imagined to resist and assist U.S.-Caribbean relations of trade, labor, and development.
