The Sides of the Sea
Caribbean Women Writing Diaspora

Johanna X. K. Garvey (Author)

9781496850706

Hardback, published 30 September 2024

277 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.466 kg

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. - H. Adlai Murdoch, author of Creolizing the Metropole: Migrant Caribbean Identities in Literature and Film

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, marronnage, 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.

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Caribbean Atlantic: Trauma, Relation, Resistance
• Part One: Plumbing the Depths
• Chapter 1: Watery Webs Weave Stories: Unblocking the Salt Roads in Marshall, Cliff, and Hopkinson
• Chapter 2: Oceanic Ossuaries: Caribbean Women Reading the Bones
• Part Two: Voicing the Wounds
• Chapter 3: Words to Heal the Wounds: Amnesia, Madness, and Silence as Testimony in Haitian Women’
  s Fiction
• Chapter 4: "I Hear the Voice": Performing the African Diaspora in Brodber and Hurston
• Part Three: Unsettling Borders
• Chapter 5: Mapping the Body: Caribbean Migrations in Tessa McWatt’
  s Fiction
• Chapter 6: Caribbean Boundary Crossings: Undoing the Violence of Borders in Santos-Febres and Lara
• Conclusion: Beyond the Door: Journeys to the Free
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index