Horizon, Sea, Sound: Caribbean and African Women's Cultural Critiques of Nation

In Horizon, Sea, Sound: Caribbean and African Women's Cultural Critiques of Nation, Andrea Davis imagines new reciprocal relationships beyond the competitive forms of belonging suggested by the nation-state. The book employs the tropes of horizon, sea, and sound as a critique of nation-state discourses and formations, including multicultural citizenship, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and the hierarchical nuclear family.

Drawing on Tina Campt's discussion of Black feminist futurity, Davis offers the concept future now, which is both central to Black freedom and a joint social justice project that rejects existing structures of white supremacy. Calling for new affiliations of community among Black, Indigenous, and other racialized women, and offering new reflections on the relationship between the Caribbean and Canada, she articulates a diaspora poetics that privileges our shared humanity. In advancing these claims, Davis turns to the expressive cultures (novels, poetry, theater, and music) of Caribbean and African women artists in Canada, including work by Dionne Brand, M. NourbeSe Philip, Esi Edugyan, Ramabai Espinet, Nalo Hopkinson, Amai Kuda, and Djanet Sears. Davis considers the ways in which the diasporic characters these artists create redraw the boundaries of their horizons, invoke the fluid histories of the Caribbean Sea to overcome the brutalization of plantation histories, use sound to enter and reenter archives, and shapeshift to survive in the face of conquest. The book will interest readers of literary and cultural studies, critical race theories, and Black diasporic studies.

Author: Andrea A. Davis
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Published: 01/15/2022
Pages: 304
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.95lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9780810144583

About the Author
ANDREA A. DAVIS is an associate professor in the Department of Humanities at York University, Toronto and coeditor of The Journal of Canadian Studies. A former director of the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean, she is also the editor of Jamaica in the Canadian Experience: A Multiculturalizing Presence.