Sugar and spice: Slavery, women, and literature in the Caribbean (Michelle Cliff, Jamaica, Maryse Conde, Guadeloupe, Edwidge Danticat, Haiti, Jamaica Kincaid, Antigua)

This dissertation considers the ways in which contemporary Anglophone and Francophone Afro-Caribbean women writers imagine the relationship between two historical moments: the era of trans-Atlantic slavery and the 20th century. While it is taken as self-evident that Caribbean literature is deeply concerned with “history,” critical analysis of female-authored fiction has paid little attention to the ways in which the specter of colonial slavery arises in and interrupts the contemporary stories told. Drawing upon the language of trauma used in Holocaust studies, and notions of haunting that have emerged in contemporary African- and Latin-American literary studies, Sugar & Spice suggests that it is the distinctive story of women and slavery in the sugar islands that forms the deep structures of imagination in this body of literature. Reading the work of Michelle Cliff, Maryse Condé, Edwidge Danticat, and Jamaica Kincaid, this dissertation argues that the narrative present of their fiction is mapped, both structurally and thematically, onto the historical past. The narratives entwine this past with the narrative present in a number of ways: temporal displacements and layerings; patterns of repeating and circular imagery, especially the pervasive use of images of rupture, loss, and flight; and the fleeting appearances of figures at structurally important junctures—historical figures such as slave ships, revolutionary leaders, and ruins, and spatial structures such as the plantation, the sea, and the big house. In each of the narratives read, there is, to varying degrees, an insistence upon rather than a resolution of the trauma of slavery; and the process of mourning that historical period appears as an ongoing process. Sugar & Spice suggests, then, that the era of slavery is an integral part of post-colonial literary representation by Caribbean women, that their fiction is deeply informed by, and needs to be read more closely in terms of, the longer troubled history of the region since 1492.