What Can Storytelling Do for/to a Yellow Woman? The Function of Storytelling in the Process of Identity Formation of US Mulatto Women

Zadanie pt. „Digitalizacja i udostępnienie w Cyfrowym Repozytorium Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego kolekcji czasopism naukowych wydawanych przez Uniwersytet Łódzki” nr 885/P-DUN/2014 dofinansowane zostało ze środków MNiSW w ramach działalności upowszechniającej nauk

Wstęp: Wielka Brytania i Commonwealth w XX wieku

Publikacja sfinansowana przez Prorektora ds. studenckich i toku studiów, prof. zw. dr. hab. Zbigniewa Górala oraz Dziekana Wydziału Studiów Międzynarodowych i Politologii, prof. zw. dr. hab. Tomasza Domańskiego

Postcolonial Nation and Matrilineal Myth: Social Construction of Maternity in Michelle Cliff’s “Clare Savage” Novels

The aim of my essay is to show how the Afro-American writer Michelle Cliff uses the concept of matriliny in the process of the feminist recovery of the history of Jamaica. I will argue that Michelle Cliff is a writer that honors the anachronistic tradition of essentialism that is based on the notion that cultures and identities have certain innate qualities immutable irrespective of time and place. I will contend that this essentialist worldview, skews the fictive world of Cliff’s much celebrated “Clare Savage novels”: Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven by reducing it to facile, Manichean oppositions between the colonizer and the colonized, white and black culture. My essay will particularly focus on how Cliff’s project of the affirmation of matriliny is undermined by her deep ambivalence about the institution of motherhood, which in times of slavery and decolonization was implicated in various discourses inimical to the well-being of black women

Culture-bearing Women

The study examines the fiction of Black Women’s Renaissance. It focuses on the novels of the 1980s, which appreciated “culture-bearing” mothers as reproducers of the nation, to analyze the vexed relationship between cultural nationalism and feminism. It argues that the BWR created “matrifocal” nationalism that made black women principal agents of national identity, but also promoted gender essentialism at the expense of social and economic issues

Culture-bearing Women

The study examines the fiction of Black Women’s Renaissance. It focuses on the novels of the 1980s, which appreciated “culture-bearing” mothers as reproducers of the nation, to analyze the vexed relationship between cultural nationalism and feminism. It argues that the BWR created “matrifocal” nationalism that made black women principal agents of national identity, but also promoted gender essentialism at the expense of social and economic issues

THE FORMATION OF FEMALE MIGRATORY SUBJECTS IN EDWIDGE DANTICAT'S KRIK? KRAK!

This paper theorizes Edwidge Danticat's book Krick? Krack! within the Black Atlantic framework which Danticat supplements with her focus on the Caribbean region and female experience, absent from Gilroy's agenda. She goes against the grain of contemporary postcolonial criticism by demonstrating that the achievement of positive female subjectivity is not contingent on exile. Dislocation is not regarded as a virtue in itself, and readers are reminded that the Black Atlantic is and has always been a place of perilous human traffic

POSTCOLONIAL, FEMINIST AND TRANSATLANTIC STUDIES- A CONFLUENCE OF IDEAS IN JAMAICA KINCAID’S FICTION

My essay will provide an overview of a variety of critical approaches to Jamaica Kincaid’s polyphonic fiction. Postcolonial as well as psychoanalytic theories have been the cognitive tools by means of which most critics tried to make sense of Kincaid’s complex narratives that are at once local and relational. There can be no doubt that psychoanalysis and post-colonialism are important framing and structural devices that account for the inner life and socio-cultural situation of Kincaid’s protagonists. The concern of my essay, however, will be how Jamaica Kincaid, an African Caribbean writer living in exile in the United States, addresses through her writing such issues as the relationship between the postcolonial theory and transatlantic slavery and the black Diaspora that it engendered, which have been the focus of a relatively new school of literary criticism - Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic.Kincaid’s trans-cultural experiences - her long residence in America as well as her obsessive preoccupation with her Antiguan past - make her texts a natural site of interplay between various cultural influences and critical paradigms. In my essay, I will try to demonstrate that Kincaid’s texts based on her Caribbean and American experience outline die relationship between postcolonial, transatlantic and feminist studies and create a plane on which these praxes are naturally conflated. I believe that using both postcolonial praxis and the Black Atlantic can produce sounder and more comprehensive readings of Jamaica Kincaid. It can also expand on Gilroy’s critical paradigm which so far has been mostly applied to texts by Afro- American males. Therefore my essay tries to achieve two interrelated goals. First of all, I propose a fresh reading of Kincaid’s storytelling through the lenses of the Black Atlantic. Secondly, I extend the range of Gilroy’s theory by using it to analyze texts by a West Indian female writer

Jemen i Liberia po Pokojowej Nagrodzie Nobla

”Żelazne damy” Trzeciego Świata. Pokojowa Nagroda Nobla 2011; rozdziałRok 2011, w którym przyznano Pokojową Nagrodę Nobla Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee oraz Tawakkul Karman był przełomowym momentem w życiu laureatek oraz ich rodaków. Przyznanie Pokojowej Nagrody Nobla tym trzem wyjątkowym kobietom miało na celu nie tylko podkreślenie ich wkładu w walkę o praworządność i prawa człowieka w Liberii i Jemenie ale również wzmocnienie ruchów demokratycznych i reformatorskich w tych krajach. Tym samym komitet Noblowski uznał iż przemiany, jakie dokonywały się w Liberii i Jemenie szły w dobrym kierunku, co, dzięki tej prestiżowej nagrodzie zostało również zauważone i docenione przez międzynarodową społeczność. Obecnie minęły dwa lata od tego ważnego dla Liberii i Jemenu wydarzenia i w związku z tym warto, jak sądzę, przyjrzeć się temu jak zmieniła się sytuacja polityczna i społeczna w tych krajach. Czy liderzy Liberii i Jemenu – prezydent Sirleaf Johnson oraz prezydent Hadie, który doszedł do władzy dzięki Arabskiej Wiośnie – podołali ogromnym wyzwaniom i sprostali nadziejom swoich wyborców. Jak ich pracę i wysiłki oceniają Leymah Gbowee i Tawakkul Karman, które nadal pozostają poza głównym nurtem polityki i jako działaczki społeczne z niemały moralnym autorytetem, pozostają głównymi komentatorkami i recenzentkami życia publicznego swoich krajów? Czy w Jemenie udało się wcielić w życie ideały Arabskiej Wiosny, a w Liberii odbudować niemalże od podstaw kraj tak ciężko doświadczony przez kilkanaście lat domowej wojny

RE-CONCEPTUALIZATION OF RACE AND AGENCYIN JAMAICA KINCAID'STHE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MY MOTHER

Jamaica Kincaid, arguably the most popular Caribbean woman writer living in the USA, has produced many of her bestsellers by dissecting her personal and familial history. Yet in spite of her inclination to anchor the life of her creative inventions in her personal and intimate experience, Kincaid, known for her radicalism and militancy, can be a fiercely political writer. The aim o f this essay is to explore how Kincaid handles the trope o f race in her novel The Autobiography of My Mother, how she uses racial imagery to unearth the covert mechanisms that account for the intricacies of identity formation and how she dismantles ideological foundations that paved the way for racial exploitation. 1 will in particular focus on how Kincaid challenges, undermines and recasts the (post)colonial concept of race by showing that racial identity is a shifting category conceived through interaction with other categories of identification such as class and gender

ENGENDERING THE NATIONAL HISTORY OF HAITI IN EDWIDGE DANTICAT’S KRIK? KRAK!

The concept of the nation and nationalism is the most significant development of Modernity. The ideas of nation and nationalism have been also adopted by different oppressed minority groups and by many postcolonial countries that reproduce Western knowledge of the nation-state with its institutions and its strategies of nationalizing the identity. The Caribbean countries are no exception to this rule, in the words of Boyce Davies, “nationalism was a ‘trap’ within which the growing independence movements in the Caribbean were interpellated,” even though in the West Indies, with its multiple peoples and languages and its long history of dissemination of cultures, a homogeneous model of national identity was hard to envisage. The aim of this paper is to explore how the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat, who is a part of the Haitian diaspora in the United States, takes issue with the Haitian versions of Modernity and nationalism