Dirty Skirts
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Wiebke Beushausen Dirty Skirts Body Politics and Coming of Age in Feminist Fiction of the Caribbean Diaspora Dirty Skirts Wiebke Beushausen Dirty Skirts Body Politics and Coming-of-Age in Feminist Fiction of the Caribbean Diaspora About the Author Wiebke Beushausen studied English, Spanish, and Business Studies at the University of Gießen. In 2018, she graduated in the Humanities at the University of Heidelberg. She was research associate in the Transcultural Studies junior research group at Heidelberg University, consultant for gender equality at the University of Göttingen, and lecturer in cultural studies at the Universities of Mann- heim and Heidelberg. Since 2018, she works at the Center for International Dialogue at the Rosa- Luxemburg Foundation in Berlin. Wiebke Beushausen is co-editor of the collections Caribbean Food Cultures (transcript, 2014) and Practices of Resistance in the Caribbean (Routledge, 2018). This publication is the result of a PhD completed at the Faculty of Modern Languages at the Ruprecht- Karls-University of Heidelberg. The dissertation “Narratives of the Body: Gender and Body Politics in Coming-of-Age Novels of the Caribbean Diaspora” was handed in at the English Studies Department and defended on 26th June, 2018. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. This work is published under the Creative Commons license 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0). The cover is subject to the Creative Commons License CC-BY-ND 4.0. Published at heiBOOKS, Heidelberg University Library 2019. The online version of this publication is freely available on the ebook-platform of the Heidelberg University Library heiBOOKS https://books.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/heibooks (open access). urn: urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-heibooks-book-452-6 doi: https://doi.org/10.11588/heibooks.452 Text © 2019, Wiebke Beushausen Cover illustration: Dominique Hunter, Fatale!, 2016, https://www.dominiquehunter.org/ ISBN 978-3-948083-06-9 (Softcover) ISBN 978-3-946531-98-2 (PDF) Acknowledgements This book would not have been possible without the support of my wonderful colleagues, friends, and family. Most of all I want to thank my supervisor and mentor Anne Brüske for her expertise, advice, patience, and trust. I also want to thank my second supervisor Günter Leypoldt for his kindness, support, and offering new perspectives during inspiring colloquia. I would like to express my gratitude to the University of Heidelberg and the Transcultural Studies group for providing an extraordinary research environ- ment and the funding of my project. The junior research group “From the Car- ibbean to North America and Back: Processes of Transculturation in Literature, Popular Culture, and New Media” with Ana-Sofia Uhl, Sinah Kloß, and Patrick Helber was a space to think, discuss, and grow – a million thanks to my col- leagues for having shared my passion for research and their invaluable contri- bution to this book. Also, I was fortunate enough to receive a grant from the Stiftung für Kanada-Studien to do research at the Center for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean at the York University, Toronto. I am particularly grateful to Michael R. Drescher for proofreading and com- menting repeatedly on all chapters and in their various conditions. I like to thank Sandra van Lente for her valuable feedback on the analytical parts, and Daniela Jakob and Frank Krabbes at heiBOOKS for the cover design and final text formatting. I am indebted to Makeda Silvera, Ramabai Espinet, and Ruel Johnson: Thanks for some unforgettable moments, great conversations, and sharing your work with me. I am enormously thankful to Dominique Hunter, who spontaneously agreed to have her art work displayed on the cover. The image playfully re- veals the colonizing gaze while staging a powerful moment of resistance. Science and discourse took place not only within the walls of the Alma Mater but also, though quite in different ways, during the many “Karlchenabende” with Marlène, Ayse, Benjamin, Max, and Michael. To them as as well as to Nicole, Simone, and Klaus, I am forever grateful for listening and consoling. Thanks to Lea for the decades of friendship and asking tirelessly about “Malu”. My thanks to David for all the tiring work of text editing – and for so much more. To my parents Heide and Reiner, my brother Christian, to Ulrike, Sabine, Andreas, and Volker, to whom I dedicate this book: I am grateful for your un- conditional love and support. Fuckin’ Fyah, Baby! Contents 1. Introduction ......................................................................................................... 9 1.1 Women’s Fiction of the Caribbean Diaspora .................................................... 10 1.2 In Search of Itself: Caribbean History and Migration ..................................... 15 1.3 Theorizing Diaspora ............................................................................................... 24 1.4 Bodies Matter ........................................................................................................... 32 1.5 Outline ....................................................................................................................... 35 2. Roots and Routes of Development................................................................ 41 2.1 A Contested Genre ................................................................................................. 41 2.2 Coming of Age as Literary Option of Decoloniality ....................................... 50 2.3 A Fraught Period: Socialization and the Subject .............................................. 56 2.4 The Coming-of-Age Novel: Form and Features ............................................... 59 2.4.1 Genre Bending and Remembrance .......................................................... 60 2.4.2 Language Use and Subversion .................................................................. 61 2.4.3 Narrative Structure and Perspective ....................................................... 63 2.4.4 The Kumbla and the Collective Novel .................................................... 66 2.4.5 Migrating Plots and the Diasporic ........................................................... 70 2.4.6 Adolescence, Aging, and Bodily Transformation ................................ 73 3. The Making and Remaking of the Body: Embodiment, Subjectivity, and Lived Experience ............................................................... 77 3.1 Whose Body Is This? .............................................................................................. 77 3.2 Skin-deep, Gaze-alert: Theoretical Explorations of the Body ....................... 82 3.2.1 Situating and Regulating the Embodied Subject .................................. 83 3.2.2 The Captive Body and Lived Experience ............................................... 89 3.2.3 Racialized Body Politics and Respectability .......................................... 92 3.3 Beyond the Body as Text ...................................................................................... 95 4. Erotic Power and Motherly Bodies in Makeda Silvera’s The Heart Does Not Bend ................................................................................................... 103 4.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................... 103 4.1.1 Jamaican History of Post-/Colonialism and Migration .................... 105 4.1.2 Black Canadian Feminist Thought ........................................................ 110 4.2 The Heart Does Not Bend: Adolescence and Non-normative Sexuality ..... 114 4.3 The Missing Body: Absent Motherhood and Breasted Existence ............. 119 4.4 The Matriarchal Body and Black Women’s Strength ................................... 123 4.5 Erotic Bodies .......................................................................................................... 129 4.6 Sexual Citizenship and Respectability .............................................................. 133 4.7 (Imperfect) Masculinities and Embodied Badness ......................................... 139 4.8 Genre Transgression and Diasporic Journeys ................................................ 143 4.9 Concluding Remarks ............................................................................................ 149 5. Dirty Skirts and the Other Body: Ramabai Espinet’s The Swinging Bridge ............................................................................................... 151 5.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................... 151 5.1.1 Creolization and Douglarization in Trinidad ...................................... 154 5.1.2 Kala Pani Continuum: Indo-Caribbean Women’s Writing .............. 164 7 Contents 5.2 The Swinging Bridge: Nomadic Bodies and Routed Existence ..................... 171 5.3 Dirty Skirts: Adolescence, Female Honor, and Respectability .................... 175 5.4 The Dougla Body and Representations of Racialized Identities ................. 187 5.5 Estrangement and Becoming the ‘Other’ in Canada .................................... 198 5.6 Gay Politics, Bodily Decay, and the Patriarchal Order ................................ 202 5.7 Historiography and the Diasporic Coming-of-Age Narrative .................... 207 5.8 Concluding