Geographies of displacements: Theorizing feminism, migration, and transnational feminist practices in selected black Caribbean Canadian women's texts

For the last two decades, a growing number of racialized and historicised standpoints have emerged to challenge the relevance of traditional paradigms such as mainstream western feminism, or male-centred postcolonial theory. One such groundbreaking attempt is transnational feminist studies, which challenge global feminism's monolithic focus on gender, and the ossified notions of identity politics offered by most masculinist notions of diaspora and nation formation. As a feminist approach which takes into consideration how gender collides with race, national origin, and class in the context of neo-colonial imperialisms, transnational feminist studies attempt to bridge the gap left by these theories that either look at gender or at race.;Analysing, thus, the multiple erasures of black female bodies in both ancient and contemporary times, these writers construct tales of generational displacement of Caribbean women's immigrant experiences in Canada juxtaposed against their African forebears' experiences of slavery. Through an eclectic corpus ranging from fiction, essays, poetry, oral narratives, and documentaries, they theorize the black female body as a site of oppression and suffering, a territory mapped by slavery, as a site of reproduction through which new slaves will be issued, as well as a capitalist extraction site, through which postmodernity sustains itself. Through their characters, I attempt to analyse how these writers inhabit the in-between space that exists between patriarchal imperialism and colonialism. For the ultimate message is: this place of marginality in which they dwell in is both a place of deprivation as well as a space of resistance, a space that embodies multiple possibilities, including that of healing and transformation.;Keywords: Feminism, Migration, Transnationalism, Slavery, Labour, Dionne Brand, Marlene Nourbese Philip, Makeda Silvera, Postmodernity, Diaspora.;This dissertation examines the work of Dionne Brand, Marlene Nourbese Philip, and Makeda Silvera in the light of these recent transnational feminist developments. By insisting on a fluid and multiply positioned self, these writers enact a transnational feminist identity that repudiates simplistic notions of gender oppression at the same time as it challenges masculinist notions of home. Situating their feminist project within the context of slavery and globalization, these writers insist on the need to apprehend the extent to which the former constructs of black femininity and black womanhood allow for the contemporary displacement of their raced and sexed bodies. I argue that in the same way slavery prevented the black slave woman from mothering her children, contemporary capitalism also produces motherless children in the ways in which it uses the female migrant body for labour.