'Hegemony of the spirit': Black women's resistance and healing through African diasporic 'counter cultures of modernity' in selected African Caribbean and African American women's writing (Erna Brodber, Jamaica, Toni Cade Bambara, Gloria Naylor, Paule Mar

This thesis recognizes the formal and thematic linkages that connect the fictional writings of black women in the Caribbean and the United States and argues that these linkages constitute an important shared literary poetics and form part of a tradition of black women's writing within the African diaspora. While this thesis is sensitive to the profound historical, socio-economic and cultural differences that shape the realities of black women in the Americas, it also recognizes a persistent shared sensibility, a shared understanding of self, nurtured by similar experiences of racism and sexism in post- and neocolonial societies. It is interested in Paul Gilroy's understanding of the dynamic cross-cultural exchanges that characterize and enrich the Black Atlantic and is concerned with contesting borders and disrupting fixed notions of “race” and “culture.”; The study focuses primarily on the novels of Erna Brodber, a Jamaican sociologist and anthropologist who turned to fiction to demonstrate the trauma underlying the lives of black Jamaican women. Her three novels— Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home (1980), Myal (1988) and Louisiana (1994)—are examined within their particular literary and social contexts, but are also read thematically and structurally against Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters (1980), Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow (1984) and Gloria Naylor's Mama Day (1988). The thesis engages the novelists' treatment of female psychic collapse as evidence of the particularly debilitating problems confronting black women but is even more concerned with the alternatives these writers offer for black women's healing and resistance. It examines how African-derived cultural traditions inform their works, not only influencing language and form, but also constructing an alternative set of values that can stand counter to the alienating dominant values of their societies. But while these women clearly argue for the need to nurture a shared African cultural memory, they also challenge notions of therapeutic essentialism by revisioning the ideas of earlier male Pan-Africanist and nationalist thinkers.; These women, this thesis argues, (re)write their shared histories from a woman-centered point of view that (re)inserts black female speaking voices in ongoing processes of self-healing and communal reclamation.