Content area
Full text
"BEYOND MIRANDA'S MEANINGS": CONTEMPORARY CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON CARIBBEAN WOMEN'S LITERATURES
Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature. Edited by Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1990.
Green Cane and Juicy Flotsam: Short Stories by Caribbean Women. Edited by Carmen C. Esteves and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991.
Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference. Edited by Selwyn R. Cudjoe. Wellesley, Mass.: Calaloux Publications, 1990.
Motherlands: Black Women's Writing from Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia. Edited by Susheila Nasta. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992.
The publication of these four anthologies assessing and collecting the literature and criticism of Caribbean women is surely a cause for celebration, for each anthologized work adds a feminist perspective to our understanding of Caribbean literatures, societies, and peoples. All Caribbean nations share a history of foreign domination, of colonialism and imperialism, as well as a heritage of revolt, resistance, and struggle to assert their freedom, a struggle that still continues at the economic and cultural levels. The Caribbean also shares a legacy of ethnic, racial, and linguistic diversity that distinguishes the region from anywhere else in the world: African, East Indian, Amerindian, European, Asian, and Middle Eastern cultures have all contributed to the composition of the recent populations, to their philosophy, way of life, folklore and religion, music, dance, and literature. Produced mainly in English, French, Spanish, and Dutch and initially following the aesthetic conventions of the colonizing centers, Caribbean literature used to be studied as an extension of the Western (male) literary tradition. More recently, however, Caribbean writers have incorporated Creole forms into the standard European language of their texts, and some authors have even attempted to write in what Kamau Brathwaite calls "nation language" (an adaptation of a European language in the new environment as it became mixed with other imported languages) to signal their unique Caribbean identity. "In the same way that we have come to accept the idea (and reality) of Caribbean speech as continuum," Brathwaite writes, "ancestral through creole to national and international forms, so must we begin to be able to recognize and accept the similarly remarkable range of literary expression within the Caribbean and throughout Plantation America." 1...