Negotiating identity in the waters of the Atlantic: The middle passage trope in African -American and Afro -Caribbean women's writing

This dissertation explores the significant function of the middle passage for contemporary African-American and Afro-Caribbean women writers. Through a close reading of Grace Nichols' I Is A Long Memoried Woman and The Fat Black Woman's Poems, Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow, Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust , and Toni Morrison's Beloved, I suggest that the middle passage is employed by these writers as a revisionary tool to negotiate female identity (individual and collective) in relation to its own (the middle passage's) haunting history.;African-American literary theories of signification, of tropological revision, of liminality and of modernity help locate the works of these four writers who signify upon, or respond to, the works of each other. I argue that the women writers use the paradoxical qualities of the middle passage (the fluidity of its waters and its rooted connection to land) to negotiate identity in relation to the collective middle passage past. They explore the paradoxical nature of the middle passage through three mediums. First, through images and imagery of water and the sea, the writers locate their protagonists' identities within the middle passage waters that signify violation and death, as well as potential for liberation and life. The fluid nature of the middle passage waters also evokes the simultaneity of the past, the present and the future which allows the writers to blend history and myth, as well as the generations of people represented by both time frames.;Second, through the process of what Morrison calls "re-memory," identity is re-discovered and re-claimed. Finally, by establishing the critical link between the individual and the community, the women writers insist that identity is reconstructed through the simultaneous act of moving into the future and of being rooted to the past.