Sexuality Gender And Nationalism In Caribbean Literature

This book focuses on sex and sexuality in post-war novels from the Anglophone Caribbean. Countering the critical orthodoxy that literature from this period dealt with sex only tangentially, implicitly transmitting sexist or homophobic messages, the author instead highlights the range and diversity in its representations of sexual life. She draws on gender and sexuality studies, postcolonial theory and cultural history to provide new readings of seminal figures like Samuel Selvon and George Lamming whilst also calling attention to the work of innovative, lesser-studied authors such as Andrew Salkey, Oscar Dathorne and Rosa Guy. Offering a coherent and expansive overview of how post-war Caribbean novelists have treated the persistently controversial topic of sex, this book addresses one of the blind spots in Caribbean literary criticism. It mines a range of little-studied archival materials and texts to argue that fiction of the post-war era exhibits both continuities with the sexual emphases of earlier writing and connections to later trends. The author also presents nationalist ideology as central to the literature of this era. It is in the fictional rendering of sexuality that the contradictions of the nationalist project are most apparent; sex both exceeds and threatens the imagined unity on which the political vision depends.

Reading novels by contemporary women in the Caribbean dyaspora alongside and against law, history and anthropology, the book argues that Caribbean women's sexuality has been mobilized for various imperialist and nationalist projects from the nineteenth century to present.

Sex, Sea, and Self reassesses the place of the French Antilles and French Caribbean literature within current postcolonial thought and visions of the Black Atlantic. Using a feminist lens, this study examines neglected twentieth-century French texts by Black writers from Martinique and Guadeloupe, making the analysis of some of these texts available to readers of English for the first time. This interdisciplinary study of female and male authors reconsiders their political strategies and the critical role of French creoles in the creation of their own history. This approach recalibrates overly simplistic understandings of the victimization and alienation of French Caribbean people. In the systems of cultural production under consideration, sexuality constitutes an instrument of political and cultural consciousness in the chaotic period between 1924 and 1948. Studying sexual imagery constructed around female bodies demonstrates the significance of agency and the legacy of the past in cultural resistance and political awareness. Sex, Sea, and Self particularly highlights Antillean women intellectuals’ theoretical contributions to Caribbean critical theory. Therefore, this analysis illuminates debates on the multifaceted and conflicted relationships between France and its overseas departments and expands ideas of nationhood in the Black Atlantic and the Americas.

"A major contribution to the scholarship of gender and sexuality in the Caribbean."--A. Lynn Bolles, University of Maryland This volume provides an engaging interdisciplinary approach to the study of gender and sexual relations in the Caribbean. Essays from sociological, literary, historical, and political science approaches cover the Hispanic-, French-, and English-speaking Caribbean areas and address topics such as sexuality, homosexuality, culture, the body, the status of women, and the wider social relations that inform these subjects. Contents Exploring the Intersections of Gender, Sexuality, and Culture in the Caribbean: An Introduction Part 1. Theoretical Mediations on Gender in the Caribbean 1. Theorizing Ruptures in Gender Systems and the Project of Modernity in the Twentieth Century Caribbean, by Violet Eudine Barriteau 2. The Globalization of the Discourse on Gender and Its Impact on the Caribbean, by Hilbourne Watson 3. Caribbean Masculinity: Unpacking the Narrative, by Linden Lewis Part 2. The Political Terrain of Gender and Sexuality 4. A Blueprint for Gender in Creole Trinidad: Exploring Gender Mythology through Calypsos of the 1920s and 1930s, by Patricia Mohammed 5. Popular Imageries of Gender and Sexuality: Poor and Working-Class Haitian Women's Discourses on the Use of Their Bodies, by Carolle Charles 6. "The Infamous Crime against Nature": Constructions of Heterosexuality and Lesbian Subversions in Puerto Rico, by Elizabeth Crespo-Kebler Part 3. Sexual Orientation and Male Socialization in the Caribbean 7. The Role of the Street in the Socialization of Caribbean Males, by Barry Chevannes 8. Masculinity and Power in Puerto Rico, by Rafael Ramírez 9. Queering Cuba: Male Homosexuality in the Short Fiction of Manuel Granados, by Conrad James Part 4. Gender, Sexuality, and Historical Considerations 10. Struggling with a Structure: Gender, Agency, and Discourse, by Glyne Griffith 11. "It Hurt Very Much at the Time": Patriarchy, Rape Culture, and the Slave Body-Semiotic, by Joseph C. Dorsey Linden Lewis is associate professor of sociology and anthropology at Bucknell University and the author of numerous articles on the Caribbean.

In Island Bodies, Rosamond King examines sexualities, violence, and repression in the Caribbean experience. She analyzes the sexual norms and expectations portrayed in Caribbean and diaspora literature, music, film, and popular culture to show how many individuals contest traditional roles by maneuvering within and/or trying to change their society’s binary gender systems. She skillfully argues and demonstrates that these transgressions better represent Caribbean culture than the “official” representations perpetuated by governmental elites and often codified into laws that reinforce patriarchal, heterosexual stereotypes. Unique in its breadth and its multilingual and multidisciplinary approach, Island Bodies addresses homosexuality, interracial relations, transgender people, and women’s sexual agency in Dutch, Francophone, Anglophone, and Hispanophone works of Caribbean literature. Additionally, King explores the paradoxical nature of sexuality across the region: discussing sexuality in public is often considered taboo, yet the tourism economy trades on portraying Caribbean residents as hypersexualized. Ultimately King reveals that despite the varied national specificity, differing colonial legacies, and linguistic diversity across the islands, there are striking similarities in the ways Caribglobal cultures attempt to restrict sexuality and in the ways individuals explore and transgress those boundaries.

Relations between women - like the branches and roots of the mangrove - twist around, across, and within others as they pervade Caribbean letters. Desire between Women in Caribbean Literature elucidates the place of desire between women in Caribbean letters, compelling readers to rethink how to read the structures and practices of sexuality.

The present book offers a reader-theoretical model for approaching anglophone Caribbean women’s writing through affects, emotions, and feelings related to sexuality, a prominent theme in the literary tradition. How does an affective framework help us read this tradition of writing that is so preoccupied with sexual feelings? The novelists discussed in the book – chiefly Erna Brodber, Opal Palmer Adisa, Edwidge Danticat, Shani Mootoo, and Oonya Kempadoo – are representative of various anglophone Caribbean island cultures and English-speaking back¬grounds. The study makes astute use of the theoretical writings of such scholars as Sara Ahmed, Milton J. Bennett, Sue Campbell, Linden Lewis, Evelyn O’Callaghan, Lizabeth Paravisini – Gebert, Lynne Pearce, Elspeth Probyn, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Rei Terada, as well as the critical writings of Adisa, Brodber, Kempadoo, to shape an individual, focused argument. The works of the creative artists treated, and this volume, hold sexuality and emo¬tions to be vital for meaning-production and knowledge-negotiation across diffe¬rences (be they culturally, geographi¬cally or otherwise marked) that chal¬lenge the postcolonial reading process. Elina Valovirta is a Post-Doctoral Fellow employed by the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies (TIAS) and stationed in the Department of English, University of Turku, Finland. She has published on Caribbean women’s writing in English, feminist pedagogy, and cultural studies.

Dangerous Creole Liaisons examines the neglected corpus of white Creole writers from the French Caribbean and how their discourse has been reappropriated to expose the significant role these men played in the construction of blackness, French nationalism and culture.