AbstractsWomens Studies

My dissertation, Caribbean Women Novelists: Courting Feminism, Constructing Nation examines how the female protagonists in the select novels of contemporary Anglophone writers Merle Hodge, Lakshmi Persaud, Paule Marshall, and Erna Brodber continually move “towards wholeness” by fashioning a self-consciousness that is grounded in the cultural values of their native island. Joyce Pettis’s use of the phrase “towards wholeness” denotes a spiritual wholeness, or completeness. I contend that as the protagonists mature and discover the agency in their self-awareness through the respective narratives, a hybrid feminism begins to emerge. At the core of my research, I build upon Patricia Mohammed’s discussion that a distinct regional feminism is key to understanding the particulars of home, identity and community in the Caribbean. She stresses that feminism must defined in context to the culture from which it is developed. The wider implication of my research is that Caribbean women writers are architects of a growing transnational feminism. Caribbean women also create paths shaped by their own thoughts and actions, and not exclusively by the cultures that produced them.