Dreams of Archives Unfolded: Absence and Caribbean Life Writing

The first book on pan-Caribbean life writing, Dreams of Archives Unfolded reveals the innovative formal practices used to write about historical absences within contemporary personal narratives. Although the premier genres of writing postcoloniality in the Caribbean have been understood to be fiction and poetry, established figures such as Erna Brodber, Maryse Condé, Lorna Goodison, Edwidge Danticat, Saidiya Hartmann, Ruth Behar, and Dionne Brand and emerging writers such as Yvonne Shorter Brown, and Gaiutra Bahadur use life writing to question the relationship between the past and the present. Stitt theorizes that the remarkable flowering of life writing by Caribbean women since 2000 is not an imitation of the "memoir boom" in North America and Europe; instead, it marks a different use of the genre born out of encountering gendered absences in archives and ancestral memory that cannot be filled with more research. Dreams of Archives makes a significant contribution to studies of Caribbean literature by demonstrating that women's autobiographical narratives published in the past twenty years are feminist epistemological projects that rework Caribbean studies' longstanding commitment to creating counter-archives.

Author: Jocelyn Fenton Stitt
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 06/18/2021
Pages: 218
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9781978806542

About the Author
Jocelyn Fenton Stitt is Division Chair of Social Sciences. Associate Professor of Women's Studies, and affiliated faculty in Critical Studies of Race and Ethnicity, at St. Catherine University. Previously she was Director of Faculty Research Development at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, University of Michigan. She coedited Mothers Who Deliver: Feminist Interventions in Public and Interpersonal Discourse (2010) and Before Windrush: Recovering a Black and Asian Literary Heritage within Britain (2008).


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