“Qu’est-ce Qu’elle Dit? What she say, what she say?” Translating the Resisting Other in Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Writing

I focus my discussion of Amryl Johnson’s poem “Qu’est-ce Qu’elle Dit”, Erna Brodber’s second novel Myal, and Merle Collins’s The Colour of Forgetting, on the texts’ representations of cultural difference and cultural transformation. The poem and the novels, I argue, present a version of Caribbean history that resists colonial discourse and that effects a process of healing and recovery from the epistemic violence of colonial historiography and the continued imposition of its cultural norms. At the same time I suggest that part of the process of resistance involves a radical reconceptualising and transformation of the Other. In these texts, what Nathaniel Mackey defines as “artistic othering”(55) is, as I wish to demonstrate in this article, a mode of resistance, a textual strategy that confronts, resists and refuses a too easy reappropriation of meaning, and yet insists on possibility. I approach the three texts as examples of counterdiscursive praxis, as texts which make “an intervention into postcolonial theoretical discourse” (O’Callaghan “Play It Back” 67). Amryl Johnson’s poem, from which the title of this paper comes, is emblematic of the tensions that arise in seemingly paradoxical processes of othering, reintegration and recovery in a creolized Caribbean context

Now the half has been told: Resistance and the fiction of four contemporary Caribbean women writers.

This thesis focuses on the articulation of political resistance in contemporary fiction by Caribbean women writers and, by using a dialogic approach to reading selected texts, theorises the difference that gender makes in the representation of these dominant themes. Representations of political resistance and transformation in novels by Merle Collins, Zee Edgell, Brenda Flanagan and Erna Brodber are examined in the context of an analysis of Caribbean fiction by male and female writers, which spans a seventy-year period. It begins by arguing that, although Caribbean writers have traditionally used creatively transformed linguistic and textual strategies to signify resistance to colonial domination. Merle Collins' first novel, Angel, extends these traditions of novelistic transformation to produce a text which is more radically oppositional and at the same time dependent for meaning on its literary precursors. Subsequent chapters focus on different aspects of resistance and trace dialogic connections between fiction by contemporary women writers, colonialist narratives and writing by earlier canonical and non-canonical Caribbean novelists; these connections are used to reveal the ways in which ideologies of gender shape the character of resistance and determine the conditions and possibilities of political, social and cultural transformation. The study concludes by arguing for the need to resist merely reproducing the over-determining categories of resistance and liberation that have characterised fictional and theoretical treatments of these themes: it argues for a need to take into account women's complex and sometimes contradictory interventions in the process of anti-colonial resistance and for the construction of a model of resistance which is inclusive, plural and dialogically defined

Categorisation and minoritisation

The disproportionate mortality of COVID-19 and brutality of protective institutions has shifted anti-racism discourses into the mainstream. 1 Increased reckoning over categorisations of people demonstrate that racial categories, while imprecise, fluid, time and context-specific, embody hierarchical power. We interrogate categorisations used in the UK, South Africa and the USA; their origins and impact. We emphasise needing to recognise commonality of power structures globally,while acknowledging specificity in local contexts. In identifying such commonality, we encourage use of the term ‘minoritised’ as a universal alternative

'Now the other half is told' : resistance and the fiction of contemporary Caribbean women writers

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

New literatures: Australia

This chapter has six sections: 1. Africa; 2. Australia; 3. Canada; 4. The Caribbean; 5. The Indian Subcontinent and Sri Lanka; 6. New Zealand. Section 1 is by Femi Abodunrin; section 2 is by Leigh Dale and Chris Tiffin; section 3 is by Richard Lane; section 4 is by Suzanne Scafe; section 5(a) is by Alex Tickell; section 5(b) is by Claire Chambers; section 6 is by Nelson Wattie

Black British Feminisms

Keynote: Prof. Ann Phoenix (Institute of Education, University of London), Chair: Dr Suzanne Scafe (London South Bank University/Feminist Review editorial collective), Panel: Ego Ahaiwe, Sita Balani, Lauren Craig, Camel Gupta, Nydia Swaby, Performance: Dorothea Smartt