Dreams of Archives Unfolded: Absence and Caribbean Life Writing
Jocelyn Fenton Stitt, "Dreams of Archives Unfolded: Absence and Caribbean Life Writing "
English | ISBN: 1978806558 | 2021 | 218 pages | PDF | 8 MB
English | ISBN: 1978806558 | 2021 | 218 pages | PDF | 8 MB
The first book on pan-Caribbean life writing, Dreams of Archives Unfolded reveals the innovative formal practices used to write about historical absences within contemporary personal narratives. Although the premier genres of writing postcoloniality in the Caribbean have been understood to be fiction and poetry, established figures such as Erna Brodber, Maryse Condé, Lorna Goodison, Edwidge Danticat, Saidiya Hartmann, Ruth Behar, and Dionne Brand and emerging writers such as Yvonne Shorter Brown, and Gaiutra Bahadur use life writing to question the relationship between the past and the present. Stitt theorizes that the remarkable flowering of life writing by Caribbean women since 2000 is not an imitation of the “memoir boom” in North America and Europe; instead, it marks a different use of the genre born out of encountering gendered absences in archives and ancestral memory that cannot be filled with more research.
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