Looking for home: Postcolonial women's writing and the displaced female self.

Abstract

This study begins with an exploration of how three post-1960 Caribbean women writers revise key concepts related to black identity and identity-formation that grew out of the first and second waves of the Negritude movement. In particular, it shows how these writers mend the gaps in the discourse of Negritude where female subjectivity is concerned. Chapter one analyzes Frantz Fanon's notion of the colonial neurotic as it pertains to colonial women and uses Michele Lacrosil's Cajou (1961) as a case study. The colonized's private and public interactions with the white colonizer do not alone cause colonial neurosis: the historical ruptures these interactions generate and have generated also help induce it. Chapter two shows how fellow Guadeloupean writer Maryse Conde elaborates on Lacrosil's ideas in Heremakhonon (1975). Restoring lost history by returning to the African motherland is futile; what is possible is a re-inscription of black colonial women into the discourse of modern world history through narratives that portray them as active and desiring rather than passive, desired and obscured. Chapter three examines how Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff treats the relationship between a feminine personal identity and a national one in Abeng (1984) and No Telephone to Heaven (1987) and the ends to which she puts the historical chain she forges among Jamaican women. Her narratives also radically overturn the premise on which Negritude is based: in them, it is not blackness that desires metropolitan lactification but rather whiteness that desires colonial negrification. The fourth chapter stands back from the texts and examines the politics governing the reception these and other writers from the developing world have had among North American, European and Caribbean critics and reading audiences. It also critiques totalizing and exclusionary theories like the one Fredric Jameson posits about third world literature and the national allegory. Lacrosil, Conde and Cliff's novels can be read partly as allegories dealing with national issues but not solely as such given their concern with the personal and social issues that revolve around race, class and gender: content must be analyzed in tandem with form. In conclusion, the thesis considers what these writers and their critics suggest through the fictional, critical and theoretical homes they construct for themselves about identity in postmodern culture.