The shadow catchers: Creole/womanist writers in the Anglophone Caribbean (Michelle Cliff, Jamaica Kincaid, Jean Rhys, Dominica, Erna Brodber, Dionne Brand, Antigua, Trinidad and Tobago)

This study constructs a framework for reading Anglophone Caribbean women's writing as Creole/Womanism. I argue that Creole/Womanism, represented by the writing of Michelle Cliff, Jamaica Kincaid, Jean Rhys, Erna Brodber, and Dionne Brand, radically subverts the myth of the family rhetorically constructed in nineteenth-century British and colonial primary texts. Drawing on the cross-cultural Caribbean process and women's storytelling, this writing offers revised notions of Caribbean identity, family, and nation and works as a decolonizing strategy in the struggle against the vestiges of colonialism and nascent neocolonialism.; In Chapter I, "She Catch She Shadow: Lighting the Way to Decolonization," I argue that through creating a text that is a "living landscape," that embeds narratives not yet represented, and by reworking narrative strategies that draw on orality, storytelling, and the elided historical consciousness, creole/womanist writers counter the family trope and rewrite the Caribbean narrative. This approach is aligned with a third-world feminism that is based on an "imagined alliance" among women which addresses the meeting of "human needs" not just women's rights.; "Inside the Magic Circle of Girlhood," Chapter II, examines texts that subvert the Victorian myth of the mother and celebrate the womanist mother who represents strength, resistance, and a connection to the Caribbean landscape and the spirit world.; Chapter III, "The Holy Family in the Colonial Garden," exposes the myth of the family that created "almost-families" in the Caribbean and uncovers the "family-like" exploitative relationships and atrocities that occurred within the Great House and Post-Emancipation Eras.; In "Emerging From the Shadows of Victorian Madness," Chapter IV, I show how intertextual responses deconstruct the pernicious nineteenth-century myths of the madwoman and the "mad" colony that have had an inexorable effect on how the Caribbean is represented.; In Chapter V, "Reinscribing the Garden: Female Tricksters at the Crossroads," I argue that in rejecting the hegemonic garden myth that conflated paradise and England and constructed the Caribbean as a "shadow" paradise, Creole/womanist writers reenvision the Caribbean as a place where family and nation are reconceived as alliances among oppressed peoples.