Women at Sea : Travel Writing and the Margins of Caribbean Discourse

by Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth; Romero-Cesareo, Ivette

• ISBN13: 9780312219963
• ISBN10: 0312219962
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-01-13
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

From cross-dressing pirates to servants and slaves, women have played vital and often surprising roles in the navigation and cultural mapping of Caribbean territory. Yet these experiences rarely surface in the increasing body of critical literature on women's travel writing, which has focused on European or American women traveling to exotic locales as imperial subjects. This stellar collection of essays offers a contestatory discourse that embraces the forms of travelogue, autobiography, and ethnography as vehicles for women's rewriting of "flawed" or incomplete accounts of Caribbean cultures. This study considers writing by Caribbean women, such as the slave narrative of Mary Prince and the autobiography of Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole, and works by women whose travels to the Caribbean had enormous impacts on their own lives, such as Aphra Behn and Zora Neale Hurston. Ranging across cultural, historical, literary, and class dimensions of travel writing, these essays give voice to women writers who have been silenced, ignored, or marginalized.

Author Biography

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert is Professor of Caribbean and Latin American Literature at Vassar College.

Ivette Romero-Cesareo is Assistant Professor of Caribbean and Latin American Literature at Marist College.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Permissions	vi
Introduction	1	(8)
Itinerant Prophetesses of Transatlantic Discourse	9	(32)
Jose Piedra
Violence and Awe: The Foundations of Government in Aphra Behn's New World Settings	41	(18)
Richard Frohock
Cross-Dressing on The Margins of Empire: Women Pirates and the Narrative of the Caribbean	59	(40)
Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert
When the subaltern Travels: Slave Narrative and Testimonial erasure in the Contact Zone	99	(36)
Mario Cesareo
Women Adrift: Madwomen, Matriarchs, and the Caribbean	135	(26)
Ivette Romero-Cesareo
A ``Valiant Symbol of Industrial Progress''?: Cuban Women Travelers and the United states	161	(22)
Luisa Campuzano
Colonizing the Self: Gender, Politics, and Race in the Countees Of Merlin's	183	(20)
La Havane Claire Emilie Martin
Travels and Identities in the Chronicles of Three Nineteenth-Century Caribbean women	203	(22)
Aileen Schmidt
Journeys and Warnings: Nancy Prince's Travels as Cautionary Tales for African American Readers	225	(20)
Cheryl Fish
Decolonizing Ethnography: Zora Neale Hurston in the Caribbean	245	(36)
Kevin Meehan
Epilogue
Hati's Unquiet Past: Katherine Dunham, Modern Dancer, and Her Enchanted Island	281	(12)
Joan Dayan
Contributors	293	(4)
Index	297