Considers the extent to which feminism and gender studies courses adequately explore diverse erotic desires in the Caribbean region. It offers a comparative investigation of questionnaire responses from Black female undergraduate students in England and Jamaica to assess the connections between their perceptions about sexual differences.
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).
Reviews the book, Race, gender and educational desire: Why black women succeed and fail by Heidi Safia Mirza (2009). The author looks to understand and unpack the complex intersectionalities that mark contemporary black British feminism, teasing out their particular implications for education and educational debates today.
Analyzes the prominent role played by first wave feminism and by women writers between 1898-1903 as the Jamaica Times articulated a broad-based, middle class nationalism and launched a campaign to establish a Jamaican national literature. This archival material is significant because it suggests a significant modification of anglophone Caribbean feminist, literary and nationalist historiography: first wave feminism was not introduced to Jamaica exclusively through black nationalist organizations in the late 19th and early 20th century, but emerged in a broader phenomenon of respectable, middle class nationalism encompassing Jamaican nationalism and Pan Africanism.
Maier,Elizabeth (Author) and Lebon,Nathalie (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2010
Published:
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
375 p, Contributors explore the emergence of the area’s feminist movement, dictatorships of the 1970s, the Central American uprisings, the urban, grassroots organizing for better living conditions, and finally, the turn toward public policy and formal political involvement and the alternative globalization movement. Includes Helen Safa's "Female-headed households and poverty in Latin America : a comparison of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic ";
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.
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:
213 p., Reveals the emotional and social consequences of gendered difference and racial division as experienced by black and ethnicised women, teachers and students in schools and universities, taking the topic in new, challenging directions.
Borneman praises Evelyn Blackwood for using ethnographic evidence from Indonesia and the Caribbean to enter into debates on matrifocality and marriage. Borenman is less convinced, however, about the significance or her general advocacy claim about gender
