SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This thesis focuses on the articulation of political resistance in contemporary fiction by Caribbean women writers and, by using a dialogic approach to reading selected texts, theorises the difference that gender makes in the representation of these dominant themes. Representations of political resistance and transformation in novels by Merle Collins, Zee Edgell, Brenda Flanagan and Erna Brodber are examined in the context of an analysis of Caribbean fiction by male and female writers, which spans a seventy-year period. It begins by arguing that, although Caribbean writers have traditionally used creatively transformed linguistic and textual strategies to signify resistance to colonial domination. Merle Collins' first novel, Angel, extends these traditions of novelistic transformation to produce a text which is more radically oppositional and at the same time dependent for meaning on its literary precursors. Subsequent chapters focus on different aspects of resistance and trace dialogic connections between fiction by contemporary women writers, colonialist narratives and writing by earlier canonical and non-canonical Caribbean novelists; these connections are used to reveal the ways in which ideologies of gender shape the character of resistance and determine the conditions and possibilities of political, social and cultural transformation. The study concludes by arguing for the need to resist merely reproducing the over-determining categories of resistance and liberation that have characterised fictional and theoretical treatments of these themes: it argues for a need to take into account women's complex and sometimes contradictory interventions in the process of anti-colonial resistance and for the construction of a model of resistance which is inclusive, plural and dialogically defined.