Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
10
result(s) for
"Caribbean literature (French) Women authors History and criticism."
Sort by:
Women Taking Risks in Contemporary Autobiographical Narratives
Women Taking Risks in Contemporary Autobiographical Narratives explores the nature and effects of risk in self-narrative representations of life events, and is an early step towards confronting the dearth of analysis on this subject. The collection focuses on risk-taking as one of womens articulations of authorial agency displayed in literary, testimonial, photographic, travel and film documentary forms of autobiographical expression in French. Among many themes, the book fosters discussion.
eBook
Violence in Francophone African and Caribbean Women's Literature
African and Caribbean peoples share a history dominated by the violent disruptions of slavery and colonialism. While much has been said about these \"geographies of pain,\" violence in the private sphere, particularly gendered violence, receives little attention. This book fills that void. It is a critical addition to the study of African and Caribbean women's literatures at a time when women from these regions are actively engaged in articulating the ways in which colonial and postcolonial violence impact women.
Chantal Kalisa examines the ways in which women writers lift taboos imposed on them by their society and culture and challenge readers with their unique perspectives on violence. Comparing women from different places and times, Kalisa treats types of violence such as colonial, familial, linguistic, and war-related, specifically linked to dictatorship and genocide. She examines Caribbean writers Michele Lacrosil, Simone Schwartz-Bart, Gisèle Pineau, and Edwidge Danticat, and Africans Ken Begul, Calixthe Beyala, Nadine Bar, and Monique Ilboudo. She also includes Sembène Ousmane and Frantz Fanon for their unique contributions to the questions of violence and gender. This study advances our understanding of the attempts of African and Caribbean women writers to resolve the tension between external forms of violence and internal forms resulting from skewed cultural, social, and political rules based on gender.
eBook
From Sugar to Revolution
Sovereignty. Sugar. Revolution. These are the three axes this book uses to link the works of contemporary women artists from Haiti—a country excluded in contemporary Latin American and Caribbean literary studies—the Dominican Republic, and Cuba. In From Sugar to Revolution: Women's Visions of Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, Myriam Chancy aims to show that Haiti's exclusion is grounded in its historical role as a site of ontological defiance. Her premise is that writers Edwidge Danticat, Julia Alvarez, Zoé Valdés, Loida Maritza Pérez, Marilyn Bobes, Achy Obejas, Nancy Morejón, and visual artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons attempt to defy fears of \"otherness\" by assuming the role of \"archaeologists of amnesia.\" They seek to elucidate women's variegated lives within the confining walls of their national identifications—identifications wholly defined as male. They reach beyond the confining limits of national borders to discuss gender, race, sexuality, and class in ways that render possible the linking of all three nations. Nations such as Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba are still locked in battles over self-determination, but, as Chancy demonstrates, women's gendered revisionings may open doors to less exclusionary imaginings of social and political realities for Caribbean people in general.
eBook
Odious Caribbean women and the palpable aesthetics of transgression
This book centers on visual and literary productions of Francophone Caribbean women. It investigates their aesthetics of violence, pain, the abhorrent, and the \"uglification\" of the feminine to unravel what makes them transgressive and uncommodifiable. It probes the ways in which these works destroy the regimentation of the \"ideal\" body.
eBook
The Moral Electricity of Print
Best Nineteenth-Century Book Award Winner, 2018, Latin
American Studies Association Nineteenth-Century Section
Moral electricity-a term coined by American transcendentalists in
the 1850s to describe the force of nature that was literacy and
education in shaping a greater society. This concept wasn't
strictly an American idea, of course, and Ronald Briggs introduces
us to one of the greatest examples of this power: the literary
scene in Lima, Peru, in the nineteenth century. As Briggs notes in
the introduction to The Moral Electricity of Print , \"the
ideological glue that holds the American hemisphere together is a
hope for the New World as a grand educational project combined with
an anxiety about the baleful influence of a politically and morally
decadent Old World that dominated literary output through its
powerful publishing interests.\" The very nature of living as a
writer and participating in the literary salons of Lima was, by
definition, a revolutionary act that gave voice to the formerly
colonized and now liberated people. In the actions of this literary
community, as men and women worked toward the same educational
goals, we see the birth of a truly independent Latin American
literature.
eBook
Fathers, Daughters, and Slaves
Fathers, Daughters, and Slaves brings to life the unique contribution by French women during the early nineteenth century, a key period in the history of colonialism and slavery. The book enriches our understanding of French and Atlantic history in the revolutionary and postrevolutionary years when Haiti was menaced with the re-establishment of slavery and when class, race, and gender identities were being renegotiated. It offers in-depth readings of works by Germaine de Staël, Claire de Duras, and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. In addition to these now canonical French authors, it calls attention to the lives and works of two lesser-known but important figures—Charlotte Dard and Sophie Doin. Approaching these five women through the prism of paternal authority, Fathers, Daughters, and Slaves explores the empathy that daughters show toward blacks as well as their resistance against the oppression exercised by male colonists and other authority figures. The works by these French women antislavery writers bear significant similarities, which the book explores, with twentieth and twenty-first century Francophone texts. These women’s contributions allow us to move beyond the traditional boundaries of exclusively male accounts by missionaries, explorers, functionaries, and military or political figures. They remind us of the imperative for ever-renewed gender research in the colonial archive and the need to expand conceptions of French women’s writing in the nineteenth century as being a small minority corpus. Fathers, Daughters, and Slaves contributes to an understanding of colonial fiction, Caribbean writing, romanticism, and feminism. It undercuts neat distinctions between the cultures of France and its colonies and between nineteenth and twentieth-century Francophone writing.
eBook
Rewriting the return to Africa
Rewriting The Return to Africa: Voices of Francophone Caribbean Women Writers examines the ways Guadeloupean women writers Maryse Condé, Simone Schwarz-Bart and Myriam Warner-Vieyra demystify the theme of the return to Africa as opposed to the masculinist version by Négritude male writers from the 1930s to 1960s. Négritude, 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 Négritude, 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. This study argues that these women writers' subversion of the metaphorical figure of Africa and its transformation is tied to their gender. The women novelists are indeed critical of a female allegorization of the land that is reminiscent of a colonial or nationalist project and a simplistic representation of motherhood that does not reflect the complexities of the Diaspora's relation to origins and identity. Unlike the primary male writers of the Négritude movement, they carefully \"gendered\" the notion of return by choosing female protagonists who made their way back to the Motherland in search of identity. I argue that writing is a more suitable space for the female subject seeking identity because it allows her to have a voice and become subject rather than object as that was the case with the Négritude writers. The women writers' shattering of the image of Mother Africa and subsequently that of Father Africa highlights the complex relationship between Africa and the Diaspora from a female point of view. It shifts the identity quest of the characters towards the Caribbean, which emerges as the real problematic mother: a multi-faceted, fragmented figure that reflects the constitutive clash that occurred in the archipelago between Europe, Africa, and the Americas where the issues of race, gender, class, culture, ethnicity, history, and language are very complex.
eBook
New African Writing and the Question of Audience
Postcolonial novels that tend to become popularly acclaimed in Western Europe and North America share a number of features: they are predominantly written by women; they are presented from the perspectives of culturally innocent or marginal protagonists; they thematize the emotional consequences of familial or public upheavals; and they are not too long but, if they are, they compensate by being thematically, formally, or linguistically unadventurous. This is the primary context of reception of much contemporary African writing, and it is not surprising that new works of fiction by African writers feed into this typology. The novel remains about the most inclusive of literary forms, but a certain kind of novel has become so dominant today as to be viewed as the gold standard, especially when this is measured by popular or critical success. This paper discusses these features in relation to three issues: the structure of the prose form, especially the novel; the external factors of economics and symbolic capital; and the politics of postcolonial stories. The paper argues that the process of cultural politics through which symbolic capital is reproduced in postcolonial stories is a function of what writers perceive to be the market of their works. By reading against the grain of Allah Is Not Obliged (Ahmadou Kourouma) and Purple Hibiscus (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie), the paper suggests that contemporary African writing remains fraught with a paradox, the productive foreignness of a sensibility that is estranged from its own interests.
Journal Article
\Silences Too Horrific to Disturb\: Writing Sexual Histories in Edwidge Danticat's \Breath, Eyes, Memory\
Women's stories of sexual abuse are often subordinated to larger political narratives of the nation-state, and this is especially true of Haiti, where the nation's political upheavals, poverty, and refugees overwhelm the global imagination. This essay reads Edwidge Danticat's \"Breath, Eyes, Memory\" as a fictional counternarrative that chronicles how empires, the postcolonial state, and the patriarchal family have abused, exposed, and compromised the sexed bodies of Caribbean women and girls. By inscribing these unofficial memories into the historical narrative of the Haitian nation-state, Danticat counters the systemic violence of erasure deployed by various cultural apparatuses that aim to conceal violence against women. In so doing, she makes explicit the political implications of these occurrences for women's experiences of citizenship.
Journal Article