Jocelyn F E N T O N Stitt

In 1838, twenty-one years after the abolition of the slave trade, four years after emancipation, during the last year of required apprenticeship in the British West Indies, a minor Jamaican newspaper printed a ghostly communiqué from the future. Dated May 2, 1938, the letter described itself as subverting linear Eu ro pean time, instead conforming to the disruptions and disjunctures of temporality in the Ca rib be an: "The following letter was not received by any of the West India mails. The post could not have brought it. It may seem to be antedated, if we compute by the aera [sic] of the Old World; but clocks go much faster in the New. .. this certainly rather suspicious forestallment of the Eu ropean chronology, forbids the announcement of any further particulars." 1 "A Brief Account and Familiar Description of Jamaica in its Most Modern Statistics" is arguably the earliest form of utopian and speculative fiction set in a recognizably Ca rib bean future society. 2 It creates an amalgam of characteristics of Eu ro pean modernity within the supposed Edenic space of the tropics. As impor tant, the narrative uses the autobiographical genre of the travelogue to provide a first-person account of Jamaica in 1938. Arriving in Jamaica, the narrator rhapsodizes that "a den of debasement has been converted into a theatre of glory.. .. It is a paradise of God!" The writer imagines a postslavery Jamaica free of vio lence and full of re spect for the rule of law, where "murder has not been known since the white man forebore to kill the black." Po liti cal equality has been established and colorism abolished: "The Assembly comprises a few whites, but the large majority consists of the dark population, through all its shades.. .. Between these exists no rivalry." After establishing Jamaica as thriving post-emancipation society, the second installment begins by emphasizing that the museum and the archive, technologies of memory, are institutions as impor tant as the church and the legislature. The museum, located presciently in Kingston-the Institute of Jamaica would

Mothers Who Deliver brings together essays that focus on mothering as an intelligent practice, deliberately reinvented and rearticulated by mothers themselves. The contributors to this watershed volume focus on a variety of subjects, from mothers in children’s picture books and mothers writing blogs to global maternal activism and mothers raising gay sons. Distinguishing itself from much writing about motherhood today, Mothers Who Deliver focuses on forward-looking arguments and new forms of knowledge about the practice of mothering instead of remaining solely within the realm of critique. Together, the essays create a compelling argument about the possibilities of empowered mothering.

“Stitt and Powell cast a wide net into this interdisciplinary field, bringing back articles that speak to everything from the ‘mommyblogging’ revolution to single mothers’ groups and how they operate on university campuses … The articles themselves promote introspection, but it is the act of reading them in the same space against seemingly disparate articles that fosters questioning and eventual understanding of just how personal and political a field like mothering studies can be.” — Elevated Difference

“This volume moves beyond a critique of patriarchal motherhood to imagine and implement new and more empowering theories and modes of mothering. With its focus on mothering as agency and in its attention to twenty-first-century motherhood issues, it is a distinct and original collection.” — Andrea O’Reilly, editor of Feminist Mothering

Before Windrush: Recovering an Asian and Black Literary Heritage within Britain is an important intervention in the growing field of Black British literary studies. Composed of essays on non-white writers living in, or writing about, Britain in the period before the post-WW II wave of immigration, the anthology testifies to the existence of a British nation that has been multiracial and multicultural for centuries. Through an analysis of well-known figures such as Mary Prince, Mary Seacole, C. L. R. James, and Mulk Raj Anand as well as forgotten writers such as Helena Wells, Lucy Peacock, Olive Christian Malvery, Bhagvat Singh Jee, T. B. Pandian, and Lao She among others, the essays in Before Windrush shed light on an understudied aspect of Britain: its racial and ethnic complexity during the colonial period. The authors discussed here, whose work originates in and borrows from Romantic, Victorian, and Modernist conventions, challenge the implicit whiteness of English writing by showing the literary legacy of the Asian and black presence in Britain. Before Windrush places this hidden literary history of Asian and black literature within the social and cultural contexts of its British production. Contributors include Julie Codell, Pallavi Rastogi, W. F. Santiago-Valles, Jocelyn Fenton Stitt, Michelle Taylor, Stoyan Tchaprazov, Margaret Trenta, and Anne Witchard.

Utilizing Romanticist, postcolonial, and feminist literary criticism, this project posits the interconnectedness of ideologies of family, inheritance, domesticity, gender, sexuality, and race as central to the construction of notions of nation and family in both Romantic-era literature and contemporary Caribbean writing. I use novels by twentieth-century Caribbean women writers Jean Rhys, Michelle Cliff, and Jamaica Kincaid as sites of entry into some of the most hotly contested issues in transatlantic studies. The twentieth-century novels I examine provide insight into the policing of boundaries of gender, sexuality, and race as the English and the Afro-Caribbean family and cultures became intertwined through slavery and colonization. Chapter One argues that Jean Rhys' novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, intervenes in a long line of Romantic-era novels such as Maria Edgeworth's Belinda, Mary Hays' Emma Courtney and Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, that express English women's fear of the contamination of colonialism and slavery in the domestic sphere. In tracing this historical legacy, I provide a new reading of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre that shows it to be the inheritor of Romantic-era discourses of domesticity and slavery, rather than the initiator of these themes in British women's writing. In Chapter Two I explore Michelle Cliff's use of intertextual references to Walter Scott's Ivanhoe in her novel Abeng in order to critique gendered meanings of Romantic nationalism, revolution, and race within the West Indian family. Cliff's Jamaican characters' attempts to invoke a Romantic nationalism based on connection to place, family, and the folk cannot have the same meaning in Jamaica, her second novel No Telephone to Heaven suggests, as in Romantic ideology. Chapter Three explores the teaching of William Wordsworth's poetry in colonial classrooms as constituting a pedagogy of Englishness divisive to a Caribbean sense of family and place, as Jamaica Kincaid's works Lucy and A Small Place demonstrate. By arguing that the Romantic period constitutes a crucial but overlooked historical touchstone in the context of the Anglophone Caribbean, my project connects discourses, genres and modes of thought usually theorized as separate academic specialties.Ph.D.Caribbean literatureComparative literatureEnglish literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsSocial SciencesWomen's studiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/132936/2/3058050.pd

Utilizing Romanticist, postcolonial, and feminist literary criticism, this project posits the interconnectedness of ideologies of family, inheritance, domesticity, gender, sexuality, and race as central to the construction of notions of nation and family in both Romantic-era literature and contemporary Caribbean writing. I use novels by twentieth-century Caribbean women writers Jean Rhys, Michelle Cliff, and Jamaica Kincaid as sites of entry into some of the most hotly contested issues in transatlantic studies. The twentieth-century novels I examine provide insight into the policing of boundaries of gender, sexuality, and race as the English and the Afro-Caribbean family and cultures became intertwined through slavery and colonization. Chapter One argues that Jean Rhys' novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, intervenes in a long line of Romantic-era novels such as Maria Edgeworth's Belinda, Mary Hays' Emma Courtney and Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, that express English women's fear of the contamination of colonialism and slavery in the domestic sphere. In tracing this historical legacy, I provide a new reading of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre that shows it to be the inheritor of Romantic-era discourses of domesticity and slavery, rather than the initiator of these themes in British women's writing. In Chapter Two I explore Michelle Cliff's use of intertextual references to Walter Scott's Ivanhoe in her novel Abeng in order to critique gendered meanings of Romantic nationalism, revolution, and race within the West Indian family. Cliff's Jamaican characters' attempts to invoke a Romantic nationalism based on connection to place, family, and the folk cannot have the same meaning in Jamaica, her second novel No Telephone to Heaven suggests, as in Romantic ideology. Chapter Three explores the teaching of William Wordsworth's poetry in colonial classrooms as constituting a pedagogy of Englishness divisive to a Caribbean sense of family and place, as Jamaica Kincaid's works Lucy and A Small Place demonstrate. By arguing that the Romantic period constitutes a crucial but overlooked historical touchstone in the context of the Anglophone Caribbean, my project connects discourses, genres and modes of thought usually theorized as separate academic specialties.Ph.D.Caribbean literatureComparative literatureEnglish literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsSocial SciencesWomen's studiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/132936/2/3058050.pd

In 1838, twenty-one years after the abolition of the slave trade, four years after emancipation, during the last year of required apprenticeship in the British West Indies, a minor Jamaican newspaper printed a ghostly communiqué from the future. Dated May 2, 1938, the letter described itself as subverting linear Eu ro pean time, instead conforming to the disruptions and disjunctures of temporality in the Ca rib be an: "The following letter was not received by any of the West India mails. The post could not have brought it. It may seem to be antedated, if we compute by the aera [sic] of the Old World; but clocks go much faster in the New. .. this certainly rather suspicious forestallment of the Eu ropean chronology, forbids the announcement of any further particulars." 1 "A Brief Account and Familiar Description of Jamaica in its Most Modern Statistics" is arguably the earliest form of utopian and speculative fiction set in a recognizably Ca rib bean future society. 2 It creates an amalgam of characteristics of Eu ro pean modernity within the supposed Edenic space of the tropics. As impor tant, the narrative uses the autobiographical genre of the travelogue to provide a first-person account of Jamaica in 1938. Arriving in Jamaica, the narrator rhapsodizes that "a den of debasement has been converted into a theatre of glory.. .. It is a paradise of God!" The writer imagines a postslavery Jamaica free of vio lence and full of re spect for the rule of law, where "murder has not been known since the white man forebore to kill the black." Po liti cal equality has been established and colorism abolished: "The Assembly comprises a few whites, but the large majority consists of the dark population, through all its shades.. .. Between these exists no rivalry." After establishing Jamaica as thriving post-emancipation society, the second installment begins by emphasizing that the museum and the archive, technologies of memory, are institutions as impor tant as the church and the legislature. The museum, located presciently in Kingston-the Institute of Jamaica would

Poetry is the breath and fi ner spirit of all knowledge: it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science. Emphatically may it be said of the Poet, as Shakespeare has said of man, 'that he looks before and after.' He is the rock of defence [sic] of human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere with him relationship and love. In spite of diff erence of soil and climate, of landscape and manners, of laws and customs, in spite of things silently gone out of mind and things violently destroyed, the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time. (Wordsworth "Preface" 259) It is out of season to question at this time of day, the original policy of a conferring on every colony of the British Empire a mimic representation of the British Constitution. But if the creature so endowed has sometimes forgotten its real significance and under the fanc...

The relationship of the enslaved past to the present has been an ongoing topic within African diaspora studies generally, and within Black feminist studies specifically. This essay traces a Black feminist genealogy rooted in Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007) and her essay “Venus in Two Acts” (2008). These are arguably two of the most influential works of scholarship in African American feminist studies of the past decade. Hartman’s attempt to use the archive to rescue those lost within, particularly girls and women, is a project also taken up in the three texts discussed here: Tina Campt’s Listening to Images (2017), Michelle D. Commander’s Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic (2017), and Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016). One of Hartman’s most important contributions is in juxtaposing the absences of the enslaved in the archive with the very real and present repercussions of w...

... the models of temporality and place-making practices that emerge within postmodernism allow for ... The post-modern family, as feminist philosopher Cheshire Calhoun (1997) notes (and Virilio [1995 ... Automating gender: Postmodern feminism in the age of the intelligent machine. ...

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This essay argues that Jamaican-American Michelle Cliff's writing should be understood within a new interpretive framework which sees post-independence Caribbean literature as inheriting gendered and raced legacies of Romantic nationalism. While Cliff's early work shows the appeal of Romantic nationalism as a means of establishing national authenticity, her later work demonstrates how these norms, when transmitted to postcolonial black nationalism, displace more complex notions of national identity that take into account racial, sexual, and cultural hybridity.

The relationship of the enslaved past to the present has been an ongoing topic within African Diaspora studies generally, and within Black feminist studies specifically. This essay traces a black feminist genealogy rooted in Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007) and her essay "Venus in Two Acts" (2008). These are arguably two of the most influential works of scholarship in African American feminist studies of the past decade. Hartman’s attempt to use the archive to rescue those lost within, particularly girls and women, is a project also taken up in the three texts discussed here: Tina Campt’s Listening to Images (2017), Michelle D. Commander’s Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic (2017), and Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016). One of Hartman’s most important contributions is in juxtaposing the absences of the enslaved in the archive with the very real and present repercussions of what she calls the “after effects” of slavery on contemporary Black people, such as being subject to state violence. Hartman's extraordinary work carries its own after effects in its influence on the writing of contemporary scholars of the Black diaspora. Campt, Commander, and Sharpe amplify her claim of the importance of the enslaved past to understanding contemporary Black lives.

Postcolonial life-writing comprises texts ranging from personal narratives by colonizers, travelers and the enslaved, to archival documents such as letters and journals, to recent accounts of individual and community life experiences. Scholars such as Sidonie Smith, Julia Watson, and Julie Rak have commented on the ‘boom’ in life-writing in the UK and North America in the last twenty-five years. Postcolonial writers have participated in this boom, creating luminous reworkings of the genre. Life narratives by writers such as Marjane Satrapi, Patrick Chamoiseau, Binyavanga Wainaina, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Lorna Goodison,,and Dionne Brand, to name a very few, tell new narratives of personal experience interwoven with global perspectives on colonialism, independence movements, and the emergence of postcolonial nations. I argue that postcolonial life-writing, embedded as it is in generic expectations of telling a ‘true’ story, can serve as a proving ground for some of the central debates and themes within postcolonial studies. These include: issues of truth and authenticity, reworkings of European genres, showing the gendered nature of nationalism, the importance of the bildungsroman, and as a narrative way to theorize history and memory.

Staceyann Chin published the first memoir of growing up lesbian in Jamaica during the 1980s and 1990s during a period of intense debate surrounding LGBT rights in the region. This analysis of The _Other Side of Paradise makes visible the connections between physical punishments during slavery, with particular reference to “The History of Mary Prince,” (1831) practices of child abuse and homophobic violence in Jamaica, and contemporary modes of recognizing legitimate subjects by the state. In contrast to research focused on homophobia in the Caribbean as largely a product of religious teachings or a relic of the Victorian era, this essay instead suggests that powerful nineteenth-century histories of physical control and discipline influence contemporary beliefs about the “threat” LGBT individuals present to the nation. Chin’s identity as a woman with Chinese and African descent calls into question a unitary identity or origin story for Caribbean subjects and asks which bodies are allowed to be legitimate citizens of the post-independence Caribbean. Chin’s personal experiences are put into context of larger debates within Jamaica about sovereignty in the wake of US and UK announcements linking budgetary aid to compliance with international LGBT rights norms.

... Olaudah Equiano, Englishness, and the Negotiation of Raced Gender. Jocelyn Stitt. ... As PeterFryer explains, African children or adolescents brought to England constituted a "fashion" for "titled families, by high-class prostitutes, and by others with social pretensions" (24). ...