The Tropical-Urban Imagination: Ancestral Presences in Caribbean Literature

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.17.2.2018.3654

Keywords:

Caribbean, literature, spirits, haunting, diaspora, identity

Abstract

This paper examines certain choices that Caribbean-born women make in forming and or rejecting connections to various foreign communities. Migration is examined as a stimulus to creative vision. By analyzing the literary evocations of Caribbean women’s struggle with issues of displacement, refusal and their desire to find a place of their own, this paper explores the psycho-social impacts of empire and exile on black female bodies. In the selected narratives, there is the possibility for liberation that is afforded through a spatialization of memory, which bears the potential to confront and exorcise buried hurts and anxieties. As such, specific focus is given to the correlation between material and spirit dimensions in Erna Brodber’s novel, Myal (1988) and Patricia Powell’s short-story, “Travelling” (2015). The inquiry demonstrates how a return to timeless and all-pervasive ancestral presences may lead to an awakening from spiritual paralysis of essentialist and material ideologies. Moreover, the project scrutinizes how a comingling of carnal and divine realms influences woman’s quality to forgive. This pursuit is achieved through a methodological approach of qualitative content analysis. Fittingly, it draws on mythic notions of time and collective memory, as espoused by Wilson Harris in The Womb of Space.

Author Biography

Hannah Lutchmansingh, The University of the West Indies

Hannah Lutchmansingh (Regis) is a full-time PhD Literatures in English student at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus. Her areas of research include the Caribbean gothic imagination, myth-making, culture and trauma. Her article entitled, “Haunted Histories: Spectres of the Middle Passage,” is a forthcoming publication with Tout Moun: Caribbean  Journal of Cultural Studies, Issue 1: Social Transformation 2018. She has also guest lectured and tutored in the final year course, Advanced Seminar in West Indian Literature and serves as a Research Assistant for the Department of Literary, Cultural and Communication Studies, St Augustine.

References

Antoine-Dunne, J. (2017). Words Are Not Enough. Journal of West Indian Literature, 25 (2), 48.

Barthes, R. (2013). Mythologies. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Brathwaite, K. (1984). History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry. New Beacon. Brodber, E. (2014). Myal. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, Inc.

Chen, K. (1996). “The Formation of a Diasporic Intellectual: An Interview with Stuart Hall.” In David Morley and Kuan Chen (Eds). Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, pp. 394. London: Routledge.

Davies, C.B. (2002). Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject. London: Routledge.

Forbes, C. (2005). From Nation to Diaspora: Samuel Selvon, George Lamming and the Cultural Performance of Gender. University of the West Indies Press.

Glissant, È. (1997). Poetics of Relation. University of Michigan Press.

Gutierrez-Rodriguez, E. (2010). Introduction: Sensing Domestic Work. In Migration, Domestic Work and Affect: A Decolonial Approach on Value and the Feminization of Labor, (p.5). New York: Routledge.

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Published

2018-09-04

How to Cite

Lutchmansingh, H. (2018). The Tropical-Urban Imagination: Ancestral Presences in Caribbean Literature. ETropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics, 17(2). https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.17.2.2018.3654

Issue

Vol. 17 No. 2 (2018): Special Issue: Tropical Imaginaries & Living Cities

Section

Articles

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