Caribbean shadows and Victorian ghosts : women's writing and decolonization /

Renk assumes that Anglophone Caribbean women's literature exemplifies "the woman on whose backs the empire was built" and that "Caribbean literature lights the way towards decolonization" principally because the woman writers "resist the dominant culture as they seek to control their people's destiny," meanwhile attempting to "deconstruct the family as ideal social institution." The author supports these sweeping claims with interesting readings of recent novels by Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, Erna Brodber, Michelle Cliff, and Dionne Brand, all described as "antinationalist" writers who present such Victorian symbols as the great house, the garden, the public ceremony as elements of colonialism that must be expunged. According to Renk these writers "foreground the importance of orality," the essence of local narrative, for "the oral story must be resurrected as a mode of family- and nation-making." The author claims that mad women are endemic to Caribbean fiction and concludes that "Caribbean revisions of female and colonial sadness move postcolonial discourse toward a decolonized era." All the terminology of contemporary criticism is here--subaltern, patriarchy, hegemony, privileged, reinscribe, reified--and although this reviewer is not persuaded by Renk's argument, the book is informative and challenging. Graduates, researchers, faculty. A. L. McLeod; Rider University