As several Caribbean critics have observed, the 1980s witnessed the end of an era of male domination in Caribbean literature. From this decade onwards, Caribbean feminist thinkers right across the region generated a surge of publications that showcased both their creative and critical talents. The range of these texts is itself impressive, as just a sample reveals: Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (1984), Her True-True Name: An Anthology of Women Writing from the Caribbean (1989), Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature (1990), Caribbean Women’s Writers: Essays from the First International Conference (1990), Green Cane and Juicy Flotsam: Short Stories by Caribbean Women (1991), Gender in Caribbean Development (1988), Woman Version: Theoretical Approaches to West Indian Fiction by Women (1993), Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santeria, Obeah, and the Caribbean (1997), The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States (2001), Daughters of the Diaspora: Afra-Hispanic Writers (2003), Interrogating Caribbean Masculinities: Theoretical and Empirical Analyses (2004), Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History (2006), Critical Perspectives on Indo-Caribbean Women’s Literature (2013), Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thoughts: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments (2016). Together these collections and critical interventions engendered a significant transition, not only the dislodging of the androcentric canon but also the raising of the profile and relevance of Caribbean feminist thinkers.
This essay surveys these publications and maps the emergence of Caribbean feminist criticism as a mode of theoretical challenge that enacted a transformative critical praxis that not only centred women’s lived experiences, but also fostered transnational alliances, dialogues, and partnerships among women.1 In reading these texts, I note how a politics of inclusion proved necessary for reclaiming and reconceptualizing Caribbean female histories and reading narratives of gendered lives, alongside an expanded focus on racialized transnational subjects that complicated a ‘black/white dominated historical paradigm’ that ‘overlooks the multicultural, multi-ethnic make-up of the Caribbean region as a whole, but also erases Indo-Caribbean and other subjectivities’.2
The use of anthologies as a discursive and theoretical platform for celebrating and registering the emergence of Caribbean feminist work has been effective. With a sampling of writers and writings, they provide ready access to both established and emerging writers, as well as to a wide range of literary works and different genres. In this way, they foster reflection on ideas of unity in diversity – a recurring theme of Caribbean feminist scholarship – and perform the dismantling of barriers and hierarchical relations they often argue against. Anthologies disrupt the centrality and singularity of authorship, authority and knowledge production. In anthologies generated by conferences, the abstract form of theorizing is decentred as dialogue, and sites of theoretical and literary exchanges take shape.3 This literal and symbolic interchange and interface between academics, theorists, (grassroots) activists and artists is one of the hallmarks of Caribbean feminist criticism.
Advocating for practice as theory and theory as practice, Barbara Christian pontificates that ‘people of colour have always theorized – but […] not in the Western form of abstract logic’.4 Their theorizing resides in the ‘narrative form, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language’ (54). Christian holds Barbadian-American Paule Marshall’s introduction to theory as a blueprint for a ‘black feminist literary critic’: ‘She learned about language and storytelling from her mother and her mother’s friend talking in the kitchen.’5 Christian also suggests that Black feminists need to speak the language of familiarity-cum-intimacy to engender self-articulation as well as to remain in dialogue with each other: ‘When we speak and answer back we validate our experiences’ (xii). Christian’s invocation of Marshall is no coincidence; actually it lends itself to the discourse of theory meets practice, validating a shared experience between the critic, Christian, a pioneering Caribbean and Black feminist critic, and the literary foremother of African American and Caribbean literature, Marshall.6 A forerunner of literary criticism, Christian completed her graduate studies at Columbia University in the 1960s, and her ground-breaking Black Women Novelists, published in 1980, achieved attention when Black women critics were few. Marshall published her debut novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones, in 1959 when the literary field was dominated by men. The feminist concerns of the novel are laid bare in the everyday struggles of Marshall’s ordinary men and women, working-class immigrant families, particularly Black working-class women: ‘These women, the “mother poets”, never had the opportunity to be recognized published poets. They were invisible, both as poets and women. These women were invisible on four counts: they were black, women, immigrants, and working-class. They had all of those strikes against them.’7 Writing themselves into a literature and history that systematically excluded them, Marshall/the ‘Mother Poets’ have brilliantly mastered the master narrative (read Western theory) through the art of storytelling. In bringing attention to Marshall’s literary work, Christian makes visible a distinct Black female literary tradition.8
The intimacy and trusting of self, that Christian underscores as critical to Black women’s survival, surfaces as central in Audre Lorde’s definition of the erotic, in which ‘our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within’.9 Illuminating the limits of theory in her assertion that ‘The master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house’, Lorde proposes the erotic, empowered self-knowledge as critical in dismantling the social, racial and political hierarchy of white heteropatriarchal power structures. Brilliant at politicizing the personal, Lorde’s Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde offers a valuable and ground-breaking analysis by bringing a discussion of women’s sexuality into Black feminist criticism. This collection of essays and speeches critiques the marginalization of Blacks, gays, the elderly and women, and, despite Lorde’s tongue in cheek declaration ‘that she doesn’t write theory’, her words radically reshape feminist politics and theorizing (7). From the position of an outsider, she understands oppressions as overlapping and interlocking. Lorde consciously rejected so-called safe spaces for unsafe ones, in(ter)jecting a lesbian consciousness into the Caribbean literary canon.10 Her Zami: A New Spelling of My Name remains an important text for its challenge to heteronormative formations of women’s desire as well as its attempt to forge a new narrative form through the use of what Lorde calls ‘biomythography’, a form that mediates and gathers together personal and collective knowledge to construct an alternative history of gender, sexuality and political organizing.
In her memoir, The Cancer Journals, Lorde stages an alternative practice of Black feminist criticism. Her body becomes the site of feminist contestations, of theoretical analysis, and engenders the experiential. Lorde, and Caribbean feminist criticism as a whole, posits the body as a site for politics, a site where social constructions of difference are mapped. Puerto Rican author and poet Mayra Santos-Febres puts it best: ‘The body is the site of perception, the filter, and the page on which life writes itself. The body reflects the ways in which history touches a person […] the body is the quintessential instrument of literature.’11 Rejecting the censorship of the female body, the hierarchized dichotomies engendered in the heterosexual binary, because ‘[it] totally dimiss[es] [her]knowledge as a Black lesbian’, Lorde advocates for a politics of inclusion that acknowledges shared experiential knowledge amongst women.12
Reiterating the demand for a reordering of literary criticism, espoused by Christian and Marshall, the Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé proposes another way of theorizing. For Condé, the task of the black woman writer ‘is to forget the kind of superstructure imposed upon us by education, tradition, and going to university. We have to listen to another voice. We can write just like the whites. But we must use another method.’13 Caribbean women writers/critics have unsurprisingly always utilized ‘form’, practice, storytelling and language, as part of what Conde calls ‘another method’. Furthering this line of reasoning, Puerto Rican feminist scholar Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert reinforces the need for theory to reflect practice and vice versa: ‘When studying Caribbean women, we must anchor our work in a profound understanding of the societies we (they) inhabit.’14 Identifying a distinct Caribbean feminist epistemology, Paravisini-Gebert argues that Caribbean feminist criticism is responsive to lived experiences and realities; in other words, ‘It [is] responsive to the conditions in which that existence must unfold’ (4).
Pamela Mordecai and Betty Wilson boldly underscore the lived feminist knowledge embedded in their collection of creative writings, Her True-True Name: An Anthology of Women’s Writing from the Caribbean, arguing that, ‘where the Anglophone Caribbean is concerned, if that literature has up till recently been a literature of middle-class values and bourgeois preoccupations, we need regretfully to assign the responsibility to male writers. The focus of most of the women’s writing – especially recent writing – has been on grass roots concerns and ordinary people’.15 With a cross-cultural, multilingual focus, this collection gathers women writers at home and abroad to forge an imagined community in which they share a personal history of migration and imperialism.16
The 1990 collection Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, edited by Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory-Fido, represents the expanding fields of women’s writing alongside a break from traditional ways of theorizing to advocate for a woman/feminist-conscious approach. The comparative and expansive collection of critical essays from the anglophone, francophone and hispanophone Caribbean fosters inclusivity and intertextuality. The aptly titled interview/dialogue ‘Preface: Talking It Over: Women, Writing and Feminism’ between Davies and Savory-Fido serves as a classic example of the interface of practice (oral literature) and theory. In a text ushering in a new generation of Caribbean feminist thinkers, the afterword ‘Beyond Miranda’s Meaning: Un/Silencing the “Demonic Grounds” of Caliban’s Woman’, by Jamaican writer and critic Sylvia Wynter, calls attention to Wynter’s pre-eminence as a critic and her continued contribution to Caribbean intellectual (feminist) thought. Wynter’s uncoincidental address of the absence of Caliban’s woman calls attention to ‘ontological absence […] which is functional to the new secularizing schema by which the peoples of Western Europe legitimated their global expansion as well as their expropriation and/their marginalization of all the other population-groups of the globe’.17 The absence of Caliban’s woman conversely engenders a reimagining of Caribbean feminist theory ‘beyond hegemonic and secularizing systems of meanings’ (363).18
Another landmark collection, Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference (1990), edited by Selwyn Cudjoe, focuses on the wealth of women’s writing primarily from the English-speaking Caribbean. While Cudjoe’s claim that the first International Conference on Caribbean women writers hosted by the Black Studies Department of Wellesley College was ‘the founding event of Caribbean women’s writing’19 is disputable – and, notably, Sylvia Wynter and Beryl Gilroy, who began writing in the 1950s, were in attendance – the conference was transnational in scope as it brought together an eclectic group of Caribbean women writers and theorists ‘to talk about their writings and to articulate concerns that generated their literary production’ (5). In the section appropriately titled ‘The Text: In Their Own Words’, theoretical and experiential knowledge converge as authors and critics explore the writing process and the attendant interpretation of literary/critical texts. The intersection and exchange between textual and theoretical strategies is extended in interdisciplinary terms as Erna Brodber shares how her method of Caribbean feminist criticism blends sociology and literature, teaching and ‘activist intentions or praxis’.20
This practice of disrupting received categories and orders of knowledge was acknowledged and celebrated as a mode of Caribbean feminist intervention in Evelyn O’Callaghan’s 1993 book, Woman Version: Theoretical Approaches to West Indian Fiction by Women, the first full-length critical study devoted to West Indian women’s writing. Although O’Callaghan started studying West Indian fiction in the 1970s, and with the exception of Jean Rhys, she only became aware of other West Indian women writers in the 1980s after being introduced to Erna Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home.21 O’Callaghan begins from the premise that ‘critics in the Caribbean don’t simply assume the “truth” of imported theory, but adapt and modify it, argue against it, and force it into counter-discursive roles’ (105). Practising her theoretical insight that reading women writers is critical to an understanding of Caribbean feminist theory, in 1991 O’Callaghan introduced the first course that exclusively examined the writing of Caribbean women at the Cave Hill campus of the University of the West Indies. Illuminating women-centred scholarship, O’Callaghan observes that West Indian fiction by women is marked by its ‘insistence on questioning the received order, exploring political and other structures that support the dominant discourse, not least by interrogating the necessary rightness of binary opposites (man as presence/woman as lack)’ (104). Accordingly, anglophone, francophone and hispanophone Caribbean writers engage, she argues, in ‘a constant investigation and relativizing of all “ways of knowing”’, resulting in the articulation and validation of unauthorized knowledges and histories of those whose knowledge is discredited (104).
Equally but differently attentive to the practice and detriment of exclusionary politics, and the significance of recognizing the range of lived realities for women in the Caribbean, Indo-Trinidadian author Ramabai Espinet speaks to the particular challenges facing feminists of Indian Caribbean descent. Drawing attention to the religious, social and historical complexities of South Asian culture that are compounded by indentureship and ‘the particular experience’ of Indo-Caribbean women, Espinet nevertheless argues that the absence of Indo-Caribbean (women) writers from the region’s literary and artistic expression is unjustified and warrants criticism:
There is no question that our contributions have been ignored or marginalized […] I think that the experience of Indo-Caribbean people should not remain within their relatively isolated community. It is part of the general historical movement of peoples into this archipelago and as such belongs to all, impacts on all and should be known by all.22
Redressing the marginalization of Indo-Caribbean women’s literary voices, Joy Mahabir and Mariam Pirbhai co-edited the first critical collection devoted to this field, published in 2013. Attending to novels, poetry and children’s literature by both recognized voices, such as Shani Mootoo and Meiling Jin, as well as relatively unknown writers, such as Madeline Coopsammy and Vashanti Rahaman, the editors and authors in this work collectively contest the critical recalcitrance shown to this body of writing which also emerges into visibility in the 1980s. They draw attention to the literary activism and distinctive poetics of social solidarity and justice within this body of writing, as in Pirbhai’s essay on fictions of plantation history in Trinidad, Guyana and Martinique, where she develops the concept of jahaji-hood, or ship-sisterhood, as a specific historical bond and woman-centred resistant sensibility.23
Gabrielle Hosein and Lisa Outar extend these opportunities for serious critical engagement in their 2016 edited collection, Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thoughts: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments, devoted to Indo-Caribbean feminist thought and theory. Emphasizing the genealogy of Indo-Caribbean feminism, this collection advances a cross-cultural/cross-racial alliance of feminist theorizing. In reimagining Indo-Caribbean female histories, it moves beyond regional thinking or politicizing, providing a ‘cross-cultural interrogation both within the region and beyond’.24 Restating the politics of inclusion as a necessary ingredient to reclaiming and reconceptualizing female histories is one of the core arguments of this collection. Although identifying a discreet body of work by and often for Indo-Caribbean feminists, this collection seeks to expand and explore intersectional identities and contributes to the move in Caribbean feminism towards establishing cross-racial solidarities that unsettle the ‘narrative of purity’ and respectability in favour of douglarization or creolization.25 Hosein’s article, ‘Dougla Poetics and Politics in Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Reflection and Reconceptualization’, argues for a reconceptualization of dougla poetics in Indo-Caribbean feminist thought. For Shalini Puri, in drawing attention to existing interracial contact more than a decade earlier, dougla poetics ‘provide[s] a rich symbolic resource for interracial unity’ as it offers ‘a means for articulating potentially progressive cultural projects de-legitimized by both the Afro-Creole dominant culture and the Indian “Mother Culture”’.26 Hosein’s reconfiguration more than a decade later accommodates ‘thinking about multiple embodiments of Indianness, which neither displace nor efface Dougla in Indo-Caribbean feminist thought’, but it also moves beyond hybrid identity represented by Indian–African contact, to accommodate plurality, thus extending Indo-Caribbean identity to be inclusive of dougla subjectivity or dougla feminisms.27 Hosein’s embrace of a ‘pluralistic’ dougla poetics eschews the misgivings expressed by some members of the Indo-Caribbean community towards reconstructing Indianness within a creolized framework.28 Hosein’s reservation about fixed, non-transformative identity bears echoes of Espinet’s earlier critique of exclusionary ethnic politics: ‘There is also within that context of “purity” a fixedness which denies the evidence of creolization.’29 Moreover, Hosein’s theoretical knowledge is embedded in and bolstered by experiential knowledge as the mother of a dougla daughter, thus engendering the interface between theory and practice that informs both her feminist and theoretical writings as well as her blog.
The pan-Caribbean (regional) focus of many of these feminist publications in English also brings attention to unity in diversity across the interrelated histories and cultures of the anglophone, hispanophone, francophone, lusophone and Caribbean Dutch territories, and suggests that shared concerns across the Caribbean remain central to any serious study of the region.30 This interrelatedness is characterized by the cultural, ethnic, linguistic and historical diversity of Caribbean societies and diasporas that require a comparative approach to women’s issues, a transnational feminism that can attend to women’s difference both locally and globally. Furthermore, by seeking to encompass an eclectic mix of genres – critical essays, poetry, prose, interviews, memoirs, autobiography and testimonials – these publications demonstrate the need for feminist spaces of dialogue and communication inter-regionally and internationally that are intertextual and interdisciplinary.
Despite their deep commitment to gender issues, Guadeloupean writers Condé, Simone Schwarz-Bart, and Myriam Warner-Vieyra object to being called feminists. Acknowledging that ‘francophone literatures, and the women writers within them, have clearly flourished in the recent past’, Christiane Makward and Odile Cazenave nevertheless point out that the stark absence of francophone women writers and writings from college curricula, and the literary canon as a whole, points to the fact that ‘the francophone woman writer – at least outside of Europe – is a relatively modern phenomenon’.31 Drawing a parallel with the outsider status, ‘the others’ others’, of francophone women writers and their reluctance to embrace the label ‘feminist’, Makward and Cazenave surmise: ‘Like “feminist”, “francophone” has the treacherous value of a handy label’ (190). This scepticism finds resonance in their argument that: ‘The closer francophone women writers are to the literary standards that dominate the Parisian scene, the better they will fare – and to date no outspoken francophone feminist has been a “bookstore success”. The less culturally confined their work, and the more standard their French, the more easily they will achieve success’ (206). While Makward and Cazenave’s argument that Condé and Schwarz-Bart ‘would not have dared use distorted or dialectal French because it would have guaranteed them failure to gain recognition on the French front’ (206) is compelling, I would argue that Condé’s outspokenness – her non-conforming political stance – has, on the contrary, propelled her to international fame and success.32 Condé and Schwarz-Bart’s unwavering commitment to gendered issues – their interrogation of patriarchal structures, female subjection, and subjugation, their challenge to patriarchal motherhood and polygamy – is undeniably feminist. It seems that only a narrowly defined feminism prevents their recognition as Caribbean feminist theorists, as in Makward and Cazenave’s description of Schwarz-Bart’s activism: ‘Although Schwarz-Bart never paid “feminist” attention to women’s issues, her readers will instantly sense a genuine love of women in her novels’ (197).33
Suffice it to say, francophone women writers, namely Condé, Schwarz-Bart, Warner-Vieyra, Myriam Chancy and Edwidge Danticat, are equally invested in women and gender issues as their writings are rooted in struggles for identity and cultural expression. Condé proposes Pan-Africanism as the lens through which to advance the struggle for independence, suggesting that fellow activists ‘review Pan-Africanism and its possibilities in relation to our struggles’.34 A participant at a conference on Pan-Africanism in the United States, Condé, advocating for unity in the Caribbean, argues: ‘If we are not allowed to be diverse and different, we cannot be united. Diversity within unity is the definition of our shared objectives of national autonomy and cooperation within the larger Caribbean’ (65). While identifying the shortcomings of Pan-Africanism, Condé nevertheless considers it a vehicle for promoting and espousing feminist views, noticeably inviting Paule Marshall and Louise Merriweather to a conference in Guadeloupe to promote ‘unity within the diaspora’ (62).35
A valuable addition to the canon of Caribbean feminist criticism came in the twenty-first century with the first collection of writings by writers of Haitian descent in the United States: The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States (2001), edited by writer and activist Edwidge Danticat. The compilation of essays and poetry in The Butterfly’s Way links the voices of English-, French- and Kreyol-speaking subjects, and of community activists, filmmakers, scholars and visual artists. This engagement of theorists/storytellers and activists facilitates a grassroots ideology that renders the collection accessible and of interest to both academic and non-academic readers, fostering a marriage between scholarship and activism. While the collection examines life and politics in Haiti and the dyaspora, the tenth department of Haiti, the floating homeland, Danticat’s stance on feminist issues is unequivocal; the resilience and resistance of Haitian women is accorded sustained critical attention.36 Paule Marshall underscores the importance of Danticat giving voice to political and feminist issues: ‘A silenced Haiti has once again found its literary voice.’37 Unsurprisingly, the literature of Haiti has been male-dominated; this paucity is being addressed by the increase in publication of work by Haitian and Haitian dyasporic women writers.38 In her literary tribute (a political obituary of sorts) that doubles as the introduction of the collection, to friend and renowned radio journalist and writer Jean Dominique, who was murdered by the Duvalier regime, Danticat defies generic boundaries, ‘bringing the personal (private, emotional issues) into the public arena (literature)’, to echo O’Callaghan,39 and registering what Newtona Johnson aptly calls an ‘audacious emancipatory act of breaking out of literary subalternization and staking claim to space on the literary terrain’.40 Reconfiguring the dyaspora beyond dispersals, the opening essay by Joanna Hippolite, fittingly titled ‘Dyaspora’, conceives of her displacement as liberatory in terms of new possibilities and new beginnings. Hence space is not socially bounded; the proverbial butterfly exemplifies shifting, migrating locations and landscapes. The term ‘dyaspora’ itself resists fixity, resonating with Davies’s view in her influential 1994 critical study, Black Women and Identity: Migration of the Subject, that women’s writing ‘should be read as a series of boundary crossings, and not a fixed geographical, ethnically or nationally bound category of writing’.41 Danticat’s collection coincides with Walking on Fire: Haitian Women’s Stories of Survival and Resistance (2001) by Beverly Bell42 and extends the creative field for important critical responses advanced by Chancy’s Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women (1997) and Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile (1997). As the title, Walking on Fire, intimates, the thirty-eight oral histories of a diverse group of Haitian women of which the collection is comprised chronicle the state-sponsored violence and horror these women endured and their ultimate triumph and heroism as they weathered the storm.
The first collection of critical essays and creative writing of hispanophone writers of African descent, edited by African American writer and professor Miriam DeCosta-Willis, also foregrounds the importance of connecting Caribbean women writers across the diaspora. Daughters of the Diaspora: Afra-Hispanic Writers (2003) includes short stories and excerpts from novels, many of which are translated into English for the first time. It foregrounds how Afra-Hispanic writers are also invested in movements for political and social change in their countries and revolutionize literary discourse by subverting its conventions. Although many of the writers do not identify as feminists ‘because they do not want their work pigeonholed by labels […] and because they consider feminism a Euro-American ideology that is exogenous to their culture’, their writing is grounded unmistakably in redressing gender imbalances, so much so that the literary period is referred to as the womanization (mujerización) of literature.43 Afra-Hispanic feminists also interrogate the ‘black-white dichotomization of race in the United States’, introducing mestizaje (racial and cultural mixing) as a new lens through which to explore Caribbean feminist theory (xxiii). Indeed, Santos-Febres explains that although ‘gender is a definite point of departure for talking about politics’, it is not the ‘predominant way in which [third world] women experience oppression’.44 Rather, their oppression is intertwined with other forms of oppression. As an Afra-Hispanic writer, Santos-Febres, like Lorde, stresses that difference is enhancing, not limiting, suggesting its ‘eras[ure] through writing’, so as not to engender a hierarchy of race and class oppression (455).
These landmark publications of Caribbean women’s writings and feminist theorizing have been hugely successful in complicating and enriching the literary agendas of a male canon and invigorating new analytic discourses with a focus on gender and sexuality. While Caribbean feminist criticism is now established, as evidenced by the mounting publication of work on sexuality and gender in the last decade, Caribbean feminist criticism can ill-afford to lose sight of the tasks at hand and needs to remain attentive to the concerns around the multiple and intersecting forms of oppression, exclusion and marginalization it first undertook to address.
Indeed, while anthologies of writing and literary critical works have been successful in mapping the major contribution made by women writers and critics to the fields of Caribbean literature and theory, this field has also been enriched by cross-disciplinary feminist scholarship. A pioneering work, Gender in Caribbean Development, edited by Patricia Mohammed and Catherine Shepherd, was the first interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary reader to focus critique on gender and development in the region.45 Calling attention to the rapid evolution of gender as a critical concept, Mohammed and Shepherd observe that feminist scholars must be engaged and remain fully committed ‘to keep up with its genealogy’.46 In common with feminist literary critics they also emphasize the ways in which theory and practice converge to locate fertile ground for further research, as they articulate the goal of their collection: ‘To bring the different components of Women’s Studies – theory, methodology, and practice – into dialogue with each other, in order to situate the ongoing work in Women’s Studies in the Caribbean in a theoretical framework from which further analyses, research and practice can proceed’ (xx). From a contemporary vantage point, this goal has been realized and is an ongoing reality. Centres for Gender and Development Studies have been established on each campus of the University of the West Indies, and the focus on Caribbean feminist criticism in university-wide curricula in the Caribbean and its diasporic metropolises signals an enduring detour and disruption of the once predominantly male-dominated and male-centred curricula. As Jamaican feminist librarian and scholar Catherine Shepherd argues, interest in women and gender issues ‘has created a thirst for Caribbean feminist scholarship that is only beginning to be quenched, by a plethora of academic publications’ (xvi).
Published a little over a decade after Gender in Caribbean Development, Mohammed’s subsequent edited collection, Gendered Realities: Essays in Caribbean Feminist Thought, broadens its focus to gendered relationships ‘in all areas of life’.47 Unsettling the conventionally defining domains of national identity, it debunks the notion that the private sphere, to which women are relegated, and the public domain, regarded as the realm of men, are incompatible or at odds. Calling attention to the ‘colonial and postcolonial processes of settlement and migration [that] required equally the labour of both male and female’, Mohammed argues that the ‘neat separation of gender […] into a privileged public masculinity and a subordinate domestic femininity’ is woefully inadequate for understanding the complex male–female relationships in the Caribbean (xv). Enacting a counter discourse, Mohammed showcases the distinct role of women as economic stakeholders and thereby insists on Caribbean feminist approaches being informed by the regionally specific past and present. Verene Shepherd’s chapter, ‘Constructing Visibility: Indian Women in the Jamaican Segment of the Indian Diaspora’, addresses the ongoing need for feminist scholarship to recognize and redress imbalances in representation across different ethnic groups to provide a more inclusive account of women’s experiences and voices in the region. Other important sites of scholarly enrichment include revisiting the Caribbean family and Caribbean womanhood through a feminist lens, and the feminist potential of counter discourses to challenge and disrupt nationalistic politics advanced by Eudine Barriteau, Alissa Trotz and Joan M. Rawlins. Fittingly, Linden Lewis’s concluding chapter, ‘Envisioning a Politics of Change within Caribbean Gender Relations’, a manifesto of sorts, brings forward the issue of masculinity as integral to gender studies and appeals to Caribbean men to engage in a serious and necessary reassessment of gender relations in the region.
Caribbean masculinity is more fully explored in Interrogating Caribbean Masculinities: Theoretical and Empirical Analyses, edited by Rhoda Reddock in 2004. This first full-length study primarily concerns itself with the politics of gender relations and the family.48
Despite the emphasis on a domestic and located consciousness, Caribbean feminist criticism has remained in conversation with global feminist activism and has notably been transnational in its formation, making visible the potential for transnational solidarity while also highlighting an uneven global system of knowledge production. As Lorde writes poignantly at the beginning of this critical praxis: ‘It is a particular academic arrogance to assume any discussion of feminist theory without examining our many differences, and without a significant input from poor women, Black and Third World women, and lesbians.’49 Importantly, attention to these complexities is also Mohammed’s touchstone: ‘There has always been a consistent scrutiny and cross-examination of gender with the categories of race, ethnicity, class, age and regional difference by scholars in the region.’50 Given the history of colonialism and patriarchy’s unidimensional conceptualization of gender and race, intersectionality, in its interrogation of institutional power, disrupts hierarchies of oppression and has been vital for opening the way for multidimensional, inclusive, and collaborative organizing and movements.
Integrating and embracing a coalition of identities, Caribbean feminist criticism refrains from centring privilege and reproducing systemic oppressions, and instead centres and amplifies marginalized voices. The embrace of multiple perspectives in Caribbean feminist criticism registers resistance to singular normative and prescriptive paradigms, allowing for new innovative, variegated, yet cohesive ways of feminist theorizing to emerge. Caribbean feminist criticism is both regionally specific and alive in dialogue with North American and European (Western) feminist practices. At the core of Caribbean feminist criticism is the notion that meaningful unity is unachievable without difference and diversity. Unity engenders solidarity, a shared identity and commonality rooted in overlapping histories of slavery, indentureship and postcolonial struggles. Through their collections, feminist scholars and thinkers have been able to map the range and diversity of approaches and interventions and to accrue inventories of cultural and historical knowledge to build upon, challenge and reconfigure this dynamic field, all the while carving out a coveted space for Caribbean feminist criticism in the canon of contemporary literature and feminist theory.
