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.
-, Interviews social psychologist and feminist Norma Guillard. She discusses her political, socio-cultural activism and academic research on Black lesbians in Cuba. Guillard cites feminists Margaret Randall, Alice Walker and Angela Davis as women who influenced her. Describes an important Cuban movement involving Afro-Cuban militants.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Discusses perspectives in Africana feminist thought. While, not an exhaustive review of the entire diaspora, three regions are discussed: Africa, North America, and the Caribbean.
Condé and Schwarz-Bart searched to explore the themes of alienation as Martinicans living in a European French society and the search for an identity that typifies the quintessential Caribbean patriarchal culture. The evolution in consciousness of the female and how she sees herself as part of the diasporic dilemma confronting Caribbean society is marked by the almost limited early works by women authors. As women found their voices and led the way for other women, a natural empowerment ensued with new loyalties as generations transcended the effects of colonialism, indentureship, and slavery.
Authors conducted a thematic analysis of 650 photographs of Haitian women in the Associated Press Photo Archive in the years 1994–2009. Emphasizes the impact of these images on the identity of Haitian women and Women of Color, as well as on the attitudes and behaviors of media consumers toward these groups.
Reviews the book "Women's Activism in Latin America and the Caribbean: Engendering Social Justice, Democratizing Citizenship," edited by Elizabeth Maier and Nathalie Lebon.
Investigates the interface between gender, color/race and public health in Brazil, focusing on the importance of reproductive health for the formation of a black feminism in the country, between the years 1975 to 1993.
448 p., This applied anthropology study, guided by a feminist perspective and in particular, Black Feminist Thought is an outgrowth of an evaluation study of the Partnership for Peace Program (PFP) in Grenada, West Indies. The PFP is a Caribbean-specific model that was built into a sixteen-week cycle program by the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and Empowerment of Women (UNWomen). Since 2005, the PFP has been geared towards Grenadian men, who have used violence against women to express their masculine identities. PFP focuses exclusively on rehabilitating male perpetrators with a goal to protect the human rights of women. This research evaluated the PFP program, using qualitative and quantitative methods to measure the program's impact based on the behavioral changes that male participants adopted to avoid violence against women.
Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
516 p., Explores the theme of power to expose the disruptions and dangers lurking in Caribbean discourses on gender and love when these are approached from interrogating the currencies of power continuously circulating in their operations. The chapters are grounded in the complex realities of the contemporary Caribbean even as they challenge canonical thought. The authors simultaneously critique and create knowledge about the lives of women and men within the Caribbean and its diaspora.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
212 p., This dissertation project aims to contribute to the current scholarship on transnational black feminisms. The project adds to the refining of nuanced theoretical approaches to specific experiences of black women. The author engages in close readings of four black women writers, Michelle Cliff, Joan Riley, Gayl Jones and Audre Lorde, as well as writings from two Black British collectives, the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Decent (OWAAD), and the Outwrite collective, distributers of Outwrite a Women's Newspaper. The readings result in several tropes within black women's discourse of this period, which include belonging and unbelonging, visitation and dismemberment, and living affectivity. The writings and conscious articulations are critical for locating transnational black feminist discourse as a distinct area of theoretical inquiry.
For almost twenty years, Latin American and Caribbean "autonomous feminism", a small yet active movement, provokes debates and proposes important analysis which renew and deepen those proposed by dominant feminism. This movement, in which some indigenous and afrodescendant lesbian feminists play a very significant role, stems from a criticism of international institutions's role in the domestication of feminism (and especially the United Nations).
Presents the Antigua Declaration of the feminist and women's organizations in Latin America and the Caribbean adopted at the closing of their 2010 meeting in Antigua, Guatemala. Highlights concern by women's groups in the region regarding the slow implementation of the agreements in the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, Egypt.
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.
