The Sides of the Sea
The Sides of the Sea
Caribbean Women Writing Diaspora
In The Sides of the Sea: Caribbean Women Writing Diaspora, Johanna X. K. Garvey examines the works of contemporary writers from eight Caribbean countries, including Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, and the Dominican Republic. Authors from Anglophone, Francophone, and Spanish-speaking countries illustrate experiences across the African Diaspora, including enslavement, colonialism, revolt, marronage, and decolonization. Characters in fiction and poetry by such writers as Erna Brodber, Jan J. Dominique, Mayra Santos-Febres, Tessa McWatt, and Dionne Brand confront trauma, engage in struggle, forge connection, and act as agents of change.
Complicating categories of identification and employing multiple strategies of resistance, these Caribbean women writers show us paths out of and beyond the binaries embedded in colonialism and its aftermath. As their texts remember moments and sites of trauma beginning with the Middle Passage, they embark on new passages, claim oceanic spaces, and suggest directions that stretch beyond the Black Atlantic to a more complex understanding of how to “pull the sides of the sea together” in the twenty-first century.
The Sides of the Sea is organized in three sections: “Plumbing the Depths,” which examines representations of the Middle Passage and its legacies; “Voicing the Wounds,” which explores genealogies, inherited trauma, and potential healing; “Unsettling Borders,” which discusses decolonial epistemologies, transgressive sexualities, and new visions of citizenship.
The Sides of the Sea: Caribbean Women Writing Diaspora breaks new ground in the scope and perspectives of its various analyses and will be a worthy addition to the library of studies of Caribbean women’s literature.
Johanna X. K. Garvey is associate professor of English, founding codirector of Black Studies, and founding codirector of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Fairfield University. She is coeditor (with Caroline A. Brown) of Madness in Black Women’s Diasporic Fiction: Aesthetics of Resistance, has published in many scholarly journals including Callaloo, Anthurium, and Textual Practice,and has contributed to numerous volumes, including Black Imagination and the Middle Passage; Black Liberation in the Americas; Emerging Perspectives on Maryse Condé: A Writer of Her Own; and Black Female Sexualities.
