African Caribbean Women Writers in Canada: (Un)Disciplining Bodies and Tongues, and Performing Cultural Schizophrenia

Abstract

This essay analyses M. NourbeSe Philip’s and Olive Senior’s un-silencing of the unruly female self. Through the creation of embodied polyphonies, multiple counter-voices, and anti-conformist utterances, these authors re-envision, refashion and turn inside out the old project of colonizing and disciplining indigenous bodies. Simultaneously struggling against the master narratives and feeling intrinsically linked to them, these writers depict the diasporic female self as longing for liberation within and without the word, an allegory of the Deleuzian “schizophrenic manner of living the contradiction.”