“Bridges Beyond the Kala Pani: Transgressing Boundaries in Mootoo and Espinet” Abstract: Until re... more “Bridges Beyond the Kala Pani: Transgressing Boundaries in Mootoo and Espinet” Abstract: Until recently, the kala pani or “dark waters” navigated by Indian subjects indentured and shipped to locations in the Caribbean remained largely unexplored. In the past decade, the fiction of authors such as Ramabai Espinet and Shani Mootoo, as well as scholarship by Brinda Mehta, Shalini Puri, M. Jacqui Alexander, and others, has begun to excavate Indo-Caribbean experience as well as to chart paths from places such as Trinidad to locations in the North, especially Canada. In considering issues of citizenship and belonging, texts by Espinet and Mootoo offer insights into both the enduring borders that attempt to shore up norms of gender and sexuality and the ways that non-conforming subjects may build bridges to more inclusive concepts of citizenship. This essay discusses Espinet’s The Swinging Bridge (2003) and Mootoo’s novel Valmiki’s Daughter (2008) through the lens of transgressive sexualities that seek spaces of belonging beyond the dark seas of normativity and taboo. In both texts, lies and repression mark the lives of Indo-Caribbean men who desire other men. Both texts emphasize spatial arrangements, specifically houses and property in Trinidad, to examine issues of territory, citizenship, and nation for Indo-Caribbean subjects and to challenge borders that maintain normative identities as they label “perverse” and “unnatural” those whose desires blur such boundaries. In particular, women who desire other women, as seen in Mootoo’s novel, pose a powerful challenge to established order and prescribed roles. The essay explores the transgressive potential of such rebellions, which aim to cross and blur identities of race and gender as well as sexuality. Further, the essay addresses the following questions: If belonging necessitates a lack of freedom, what does free choice entail? What stepping stones might form the bridge to full citizenship
Johanna Garvey explores manifestations of madness, resistance, and healing experienced by women i... more Johanna Garvey explores manifestations of madness, resistance, and healing experienced by women in texts by two authors, one writing from within Haiti and one from its dyaspora. The discussion centers on Evelyne Trouillot’s novel Rosalie L’Infâme (2003), a fictional evocation of maroons and the enslaved in Haiti leading up to the Revolution, and Roxane Gay’s recent novel An Untamed State (2014), which recounts the kidnapping, rape, and abuse suffered by a Haitian American woman in contemporary Port-au-Prince. Each text suggests how to stitch the torn fabric of Haitian history, both individual and collective, revisiting horrific acts in a process of testifying and witnessing. Drawing upon the figure of the maroon, Garvey argues that the female protagonists perform both literal and figurative marronnage, expressing themselves from the space created by rupture and dechirure, a refuge that affords each of them the opportunity to remember, redact, and reflect, as they tell their stories ...
This chapter provides a concluding look at the volume, arguing that to trace madness through Blac... more This chapter provides a concluding look at the volume, arguing that to trace madness through Black women’s fiction, to map the Diaspora via explorations of psychic distress and dis-ease, is to create a cartography that displaces the normalizing once imposed by Europeans who explored territories to them unknown and uninhabitable. The authors and texts discussed in this volume invite us to envision the “undared” and to invent new geographies that spring from madness and imagination. The insanity is both toxin and cure, an illness that possesses within it the potential to heal. The diaspora born of a mad desire to take possession of people and of places, to colonize and to enslave, paradoxically nurtures an insanity that resists domination and reclaims selfhood. As Dionne Brand says, the “fiction” may have been created by imperial powers, but it also inspires “self-creation.” This chapter also draws on Sylvia Wynter’s ongoing project to unsettle and disrupt the colonial enterprise. The...
... Anticipating by half a century the theories of feminists such as Cixous or Irigaray, Woolf sk... more ... Anticipating by half a century the theories of feminists such as Cixous or Irigaray, Woolf sketches an argument for moving beyond binarisms or polarities, or dichotomous readings of gender, to a more open text, fantastic, visionary.14 Like Stephen Dedalus, who walks the beach ...
... in Eliot's poem, a text in which "the city and the woman's body melt together ... more ... in Eliot's poem, a text in which "the city and the woman's body melt together ... 8 For a reading of Molly as more active, her "work of consumption" incorporating her into a ... This essay originated in a paper presented at the Miamafesta James Joyce Birthday Conference, Miami, 1990 ...
... Anticipating by half a century the theories of feminists such as Cixous or Irigaray, Woolf sk... more ... Anticipating by half a century the theories of feminists such as Cixous or Irigaray, Woolf sketches an argument for moving beyond binarisms or polarities, or dichotomous readings of gender, to a more open text, fantastic, visionary.14 Like Stephen Dedalus, who walks the beach ...
“Bridges Beyond the Kala Pani: Transgressing Boundaries in Mootoo and Espinet” Abstract: Until re... more “Bridges Beyond the Kala Pani: Transgressing Boundaries in Mootoo and Espinet” Abstract: Until recently, the kala pani or “dark waters” navigated by Indian subjects indentured and shipped to locations in the Caribbean remained largely unexplored. In the past decade, the fiction of authors such as Ramabai Espinet and Shani Mootoo, as well as scholarship by Brinda Mehta, Shalini Puri, M. Jacqui Alexander, and others, has begun to excavate Indo-Caribbean experience as well as to chart paths from places such as Trinidad to locations in the North, especially Canada. In considering issues of citizenship and belonging, texts by Espinet and Mootoo offer insights into both the enduring borders that attempt to shore up norms of gender and sexuality and the ways that non-conforming subjects may build bridges to more inclusive concepts of citizenship. This essay discusses Espinet’s The Swinging Bridge (2003) and Mootoo’s novel Valmiki’s Daughter (2008) through the lens of transgressive sexualities that seek spaces of belonging beyond the dark seas of normativity and taboo. In both texts, lies and repression mark the lives of Indo-Caribbean men who desire other men. Both texts emphasize spatial arrangements, specifically houses and property in Trinidad, to examine issues of territory, citizenship, and nation for Indo-Caribbean subjects and to challenge borders that maintain normative identities as they label “perverse” and “unnatural” those whose desires blur such boundaries. In particular, women who desire other women, as seen in Mootoo’s novel, pose a powerful challenge to established order and prescribed roles. The essay explores the transgressive potential of such rebellions, which aim to cross and blur identities of race and gender as well as sexuality. Further, the essay addresses the following questions: If belonging necessitates a lack of freedom, what does free choice entail? What stepping stones might form the bridge to full citizenship
Johanna Garvey explores manifestations of madness, resistance, and healing experienced by women i... more Johanna Garvey explores manifestations of madness, resistance, and healing experienced by women in texts by two authors, one writing from within Haiti and one from its dyaspora. The discussion centers on Evelyne Trouillot’s novel Rosalie L’Infâme (2003), a fictional evocation of maroons and the enslaved in Haiti leading up to the Revolution, and Roxane Gay’s recent novel An Untamed State (2014), which recounts the kidnapping, rape, and abuse suffered by a Haitian American woman in contemporary Port-au-Prince. Each text suggests how to stitch the torn fabric of Haitian history, both individual and collective, revisiting horrific acts in a process of testifying and witnessing. Drawing upon the figure of the maroon, Garvey argues that the female protagonists perform both literal and figurative marronnage, expressing themselves from the space created by rupture and dechirure, a refuge that affords each of them the opportunity to remember, redact, and reflect, as they tell their stories ...
This chapter provides a concluding look at the volume, arguing that to trace madness through Blac... more This chapter provides a concluding look at the volume, arguing that to trace madness through Black women’s fiction, to map the Diaspora via explorations of psychic distress and dis-ease, is to create a cartography that displaces the normalizing once imposed by Europeans who explored territories to them unknown and uninhabitable. The authors and texts discussed in this volume invite us to envision the “undared” and to invent new geographies that spring from madness and imagination. The insanity is both toxin and cure, an illness that possesses within it the potential to heal. The diaspora born of a mad desire to take possession of people and of places, to colonize and to enslave, paradoxically nurtures an insanity that resists domination and reclaims selfhood. As Dionne Brand says, the “fiction” may have been created by imperial powers, but it also inspires “self-creation.” This chapter also draws on Sylvia Wynter’s ongoing project to unsettle and disrupt the colonial enterprise. The...
... Anticipating by half a century the theories of feminists such as Cixous or Irigaray, Woolf sk... more ... Anticipating by half a century the theories of feminists such as Cixous or Irigaray, Woolf sketches an argument for moving beyond binarisms or polarities, or dichotomous readings of gender, to a more open text, fantastic, visionary.14 Like Stephen Dedalus, who walks the beach ...
... in Eliot's poem, a text in which "the city and the woman's body melt together ... more ... in Eliot's poem, a text in which "the city and the woman's body melt together ... 8 For a reading of Molly as more active, her "work of consumption" incorporating her into a ... This essay originated in a paper presented at the Miamafesta James Joyce Birthday Conference, Miami, 1990 ...
... Anticipating by half a century the theories of feminists such as Cixous or Irigaray, Woolf sk... more ... Anticipating by half a century the theories of feminists such as Cixous or Irigaray, Woolf sketches an argument for moving beyond binarisms or polarities, or dichotomous readings of gender, to a more open text, fantastic, visionary.14 Like Stephen Dedalus, who walks the beach ...
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