Speaking In (M)other Tongues

This is the publisher's version, also available electronically from http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/callaloo/v025/25.3anatol.htmlNo abstract is available for this item

Maternal Discourses in Nalo Hopkinson's "Midnight Robber"

This is the publisher's version, also available electronically from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40027035?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents.See article for abstract

Haunted Houses and Ghostly Homes:Kacen Callender’s Hurricane Child as a Re-Writing of Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie_John

This essay responds to the dearth of analysis of young adult (YA) literature in postcolonial scholarship by placing Kacen Callender’s LGBTQ+ middle-grade novel, Hurricane Child (2018) adjacent to Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John (1987), a foundational text of contemporary Caribbean literature. I employ Homi Bhabha’s reformulation of Freud’s unheimlich, or “un-home-ly,” to interrogate how both writers complicate ideas of literal home and island home as places of fun, comfort, and safety. Just as the nostalgic image of the adoring mother discombobulates Kincaid’s Annie, the figure of the physically-absent mother plagues Callender’s Caroline. Both characters can therefore be said to live in symbolically “haunted” houses. Additionally, shame lurks in the corners of Caroline’s psyche as she comes to recognize her budding same-sex desires, which put her at risk of being “ghosted,” or erased, as a valued member of her community. Extending the psychic trauma from the narrators to the histories of their islands, and relying on critical work on the Gothic by Avery Gordon, Maisha Wester, and others, politically charged depictions of landscapes are excavated for signs of literal spirits and evidence of haunting by slavery, colonialism, and the neocolonial systems of the late twentieth / early twenty-first century

Mother countries, motherlands, and mother love: Representations of motherhood in twentieth-century Caribbean women\u27s literature

Like African American women, African Caribbean women have been influenced by their migratory experiences--both forced and voluntary--and by slavery\u27s staggering brutality. In addition, however, they have also been profoundly shaped by the colonial system and regional nationalist movements that burgeoned in the twentieth century. Throughout the history of territorial acquisitions, European imperial powers linked themselves to the image of motherhood by referring to their nations as mother country. In the early twentieth century, Caribbean revolutionaries decried this ideology and recast the maternal image by adopting the notion of their islands as motherlands and/or urging for reconnections to Mother Africa. My dissertation is concerned with how motherhood as a material fact has been lost through this ideological contestation. I argue that despite the fact that motherhood is incorporated into the everyday lives of most Caribbean women, women writers cannot easily dissociate their own representations of motherhood from the colonial and patriarchal overlay. The result is a literature burdened by the fragmentation of the relationships between mothers and their children. I explore the fraught notion of inescapable bonds to mothers, including the romanticized bonds to the motherlands of Africa and the Caribbean islands

Mother countries, motherlands, and mother love: Representations of motherhood in twentieth-century Caribbean women\u27s literature

Like African American women, African Caribbean women have been influenced by their migratory experiences--both forced and voluntary--and by slavery\u27s staggering brutality. In addition, however, they have also been profoundly shaped by the colonial system and regional nationalist movements that burgeoned in the twentieth century. Throughout the history of territorial acquisitions, European imperial powers linked themselves to the image of motherhood by referring to their nations as mother country. In the early twentieth century, Caribbean revolutionaries decried this ideology and recast the maternal image by adopting the notion of their islands as motherlands and/or urging for reconnections to Mother Africa. My dissertation is concerned with how motherhood as a material fact has been lost through this ideological contestation. I argue that despite the fact that motherhood is incorporated into the everyday lives of most Caribbean women, women writers cannot easily dissociate their own representations of motherhood from the colonial and patriarchal overlay. The result is a literature burdened by the fragmentation of the relationships between mothers and their children. I explore the fraught notion of inescapable bonds to mothers, including the romanticized bonds to the motherlands of Africa and the Caribbean islands

Queering/Querying the Text in Patricia Powell’s The Pagoda and Sui Sin Far's "Jamaica Works"

Although African-Jamaican novelist Patricia Powell and Chinese-Canadian writer Sui Sin Far were born a century apart, their artistic works are strongly linked by setting and the authors’ forceful critiques of the British Empire and colonial knowledge production. For Far, the empire supplied a transnational link from Shanghai, where Far’s English father met her Chinese mother, to England and the British dominion of Canada, where she spent her childhood. Less often considered is the time Far spent in the British “West Indies” colony of Jamaica. Correspondingly, Patricia Powell’s 1999 novel The Pagoda, which features a gender-queer Chinese Jamaican protagonist seeking a firm foothold in post-Emancipation colonial Jamaica, holds significance in Chinese Americas historiography and deserves more exploration beyond the book’s conventional categorization as queer fiction of the Anglophone Caribbean. Looking at Powell’s Chinese/Jamaican community in conjunction with Far’s Jamaica stories--particularly “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of a Eurasian” and “The Sugar-Cane Baby”--enables an examination of the ways both authors challenge xenophobic and imperialist regimes, especially those predicated on knowledge production and literacy. Far’s decision to “fight [...] battles” on behalf of Chinese Americans by writing articles in local papers and Powell’s artistic choice to open and close her novel with the act of letter-writing foreground the complex ways that composing and deciphering all kinds of texts can contribute to and subvert empire building, and whether the “master’s tools” can be successfully employed to destroy the master’s house

Queering/Querying the Text in Patricia Powell’s The Pagoda and Sui Sin Far's "Jamaica Works"

Although African-Jamaican novelist Patricia Powell and Chinese-Canadian writer Sui Sin Far were born a century apart, their artistic works are strongly linked by setting and the authors’ forceful critiques of the British Empire and colonial knowledge production. For Far, the empire supplied a transnational link from Shanghai, where Far’s English father met her Chinese mother, to England and the British dominion of Canada, where she spent her childhood. Less often considered is the time Far spent in the British “West Indies” colony of Jamaica. Correspondingly, Patricia Powell’s 1999 novel The Pagoda, which features a gender-queer Chinese Jamaican protagonist seeking a firm foothold in post-Emancipation colonial Jamaica, holds significance in Chinese Americas historiography and deserves more exploration beyond the book’s conventional categorization as queer fiction of the Anglophone Caribbean. Looking at Powell’s Chinese/Jamaican community in conjunction with Far’s Jamaica stories--particularly “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of a Eurasian” and “The Sugar-Cane Baby”--enables an examination of the ways both authors challenge xenophobic and imperialist regimes, especially those predicated on knowledge production and literacy. Far’s decision to “fight [...] battles” on behalf of Chinese Americans by writing articles in local papers and Powell’s artistic choice to open and close her novel with the act of letter-writing foreground the complex ways that composing and deciphering all kinds of texts can contribute to and subvert empire building, and whether the “master’s tools” can be successfully employed to destroy the master’s house

Introduction – Literature and Music in the Americas

Anatol GL, Raussert W. Introduction – Literature and Music in the Americas. In: Raussert W, Anatol GL, Thies S, Corona Berkin S, Lozano JC, eds. The Routledge Handbook to the Culture and Media of the Americas. 1st Edition. London/New York: Routledge; 2020: 17-22