Bodies and Bones: Feminist Rehearsal and Imagining Caribbean Belonging

by Tanya L. Shields

Overview

In Bodies and Bones, Tanya Shields argues that a repeated engagement with the Caribbean’s iconic and historic touchstones offers a new sense of (inter)national belonging that brings an alternative and dynamic vision to the gendered legacy of brutality against black bodies, flesh, and bone. Using a distinctive methodology she calls "feminist rehearsal" to chart the Caribbean’s multiple and contradictory accounts of historical events, the author highlights the gendered and emergent connections between art, history, and belonging.

By drawing on a significant range of genres—novels, short stories, poetry, plays, public statuary, and painting—Shields proposes innovative interpretations of the work of Grace Nichols, Pauline Melville, Fred D’Aguiar, Alejo Carpentier, Edwidge Danticat, Aimé Césaire, Marie-Hélène Cauvin, and Rose Marie Desruisseau. She shows how empathetic alliances can challenge both hierarchical institutions and regressive nationalisms and facilitate more democratic interaction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813935973
Publisher:	University of Virginia Press
Publication date:	06/02/2014
Series:	New World Studies
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	8.80(w) x 5.90(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Tanya L. Shields is Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Reading Caribbean Resistance through Feminist Rehearsal 1

1 Rehearsing with Ghosts 23

2 Their Bones Would Reject Yours 52

3 Hope and Infinity 88

4 Signs of Sycorax 114

5 Rehearsing Indigeneity 145

Conclusion: Rehearsal and Proxy-formance 167

Notes 175

Bibliography 203

Index 221

Editorial Reviews

Bodies and Bones will greatly impact Caribbean scholarship on gender, race, and representation, particularly with regard to how one talks about intersectionality in a Caribbean context. Not only is Shields successful in proving her arguments; she also offers up a new theoretical paradigm for reading Caribbean texts while sifting through an exhaustive amount of history.

Kimberly Nichele Brown

Tanya Shields brings into striking juxtaposition a variety of visual and textual examples to examine the intersections between gender, the body, and citizenship.

April Shemak

" Bodies and Bones will greatly impact Caribbean scholarship on gender, race, and representation, particularly with regard to how one talks about intersectionality in a Caribbean context. Not only is Shields successful in proving her arguments; she also offers up a new theoretical paradigm for reading Caribbean texts while sifting through an exhaustive amount of history. "—Kimberly Nichele Brown, Virginia Commonwealth University, author of Writing the Black Revolutionary Diva: Women’s Subjectivity and the Decolonizing Text

"Tanya Shields brings into striking juxtaposition a variety of visual and textual examples to examine the intersections between gender, the body, and citizenship. "—April Shemak, Sam Houston State University, author of Asylum Speakers: Caribbean Refugees and Testimonial Discourse

From the Publisher