| dc.description.abstract | This thesis uses the concepts, definitions, theories, and poetry of black
women, in particular highlighting those of Africaribbean women, to look at the
construction of identity in two novels by two women of the Caribbean diaspora;
Frangipani House by Beryl Gilroy and No Telephone to Heaven by Michelle Cliff.
Black women’s self-articulations counter the dichotomies of self/other, black/white,
the West/Third World, and oppressor/oppressed that underlie dominant Western
stereotypes of black womanhood. Attending to black women’s voices opens up the
complex, shifting matrix of social and political relations that constitute the lives of
the people populating Gilroy’s and Cliffs novels. The plural and migratory
subjectivities that surface not only counter the Cartesian concept of identity, but
also differ from a generalized post-structuralist subjectivity by drawing on the
specificities of women whose histories are anchored in West Africa, the Middle
Passage, and slavery. The plural subjectivities of women such as Mama King and
Clare Savage (the “protagonists” o f the two novels) reveal the intersections of self
and community, past and present, ancestors and inheritors, imagination and reality,
and the political and the spiritual. Central to this thesis is a close look at Gilroy’s
and Cliffs re-writing of English and English Literature through an analysis of each
author’s particular use o f language, her narrative strategies, and the structure of her
novel. In this thesis, then, I highlight the intersections of language and subjectivity,
and by looking at memory, the community and the self, develop the idea that a
black woman’s identity is multiply situated and shifting, and that a multiplicity of
voices constructs her story. In other words, her story is always already plural. | |
