Olive Senior Research Articles

The flavours of mixing: Postcolonial literary representations of cooking as a feminine mode of creolization

ABSTRACT This article examines the place of food and cooking in Caribbean women’s postcolonial writings, and concentrates on the works of two women authors of Caribbean origins: Jean Rhys and Olive Senior. It explores how the representations of cooking and culinary traditions help us to rethink the process of creolization from a feminine perspective. Creolization is a process of cultural encounter and mixing that is central to the understanding of Caribbean identities. However, the theories of creolization have often omitted the role that women play in this process. This article focuses on cooking, an activity usually conceived as feminine and shows how it participates in the opposition to the continuation of racial, social, and sexual domination resulting from colonization. It demonstrates how the two selected authors tackle the topic of cooking, and how they rehabilitate this activity as an art and as a key element in the transmission of creolized cultures.

Gardening in Polluted Tropics: The Materiality of Waste and Toxicity in Olive Senior’s Caribbean Poetry

While toxic substances continue increasingly, and unevenly, infiltrating the world, the new materialist turn invites us to examine the relationalities emerging between pollution and literature. This essay examines how Olive Senior’s poetry collection Gardening in the Tropics portrays the imposition of waste and toxicity on Caribbean islands and the counter-narratives to toxic politics that emerge from non-hegemonic perspectives. The paper utilizes methodological contributions from the fields of waste studies, postcolonial and material ecocriticism, and addresses the need for more scholarship centering toxicity in cultural studies, especially through the lens of tropical materialisms. Moreover, the research engages with theorizations surrounding the concept of the Wasteocene as a novel interpretative framework. The main findings reveal that the poems “My Father’s Blue Plantation”, “The Immovable Tenant” and “Advice and Devices” identify how extensive pollution is enabled and perpetuated by colonial systems. The poems illustrate the environmental and socio-political tensions prompted by toxicity, its deleterious effects in organisms and landscapes, and embody how guerrilla narratives can confront widespread toxicity.

Perspectives on the Pandemic: Contemporary Personal Essays as a Space of Resistance

It may be argued that writing about contemporaneity risks being a mere description of what Braudel would term ‘episodic time’—the short-term perspective of newspapers and chronicles. However, when political and social events spread into literature, there is a nuanced language of presence (Barthes). By not being bound to a specific mode of narration, the essay’s brevity and incisiveness seems particularly suitable to decipher the contemporary. This paper presents a comparative reading of personal essays published between April and July 2020 by Olive Senior, Deborah Levy, and Zadie Smith, and it argues that there are two main ways of resisting: the choice of writing in itself, and the choice of topics and issues. The immediate response of writers in the form of essays published in book form, in online magazines, or special sections of the websites of publishing houses is a clear example of how literature—and indeed the literary mind—can be a space for thinking about the present and putting things into perspective. By overcoming the possible limitations represented by the thematization of the pandemic, the writers open towards what may appear as a different, but still very close, temporality: that of physical and discourse-based violence on female bodies, on black bodies, and on the Earth. This paper will then come to the conclusion that writing is an act of resistance and that literature has the power to narrate the real “interpret[ing] the world […] one word at a time” (Senior, “Cross Words”).

Magic and Identity in Anglophone and Hispanaphone Caribbean Literature

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, literature in the Caribbean underwent a period of significant development. The word “Caribbean” encompasses such a vast cultural, locational, and linguistic span that it is difficult to make generalizations about trends in the literature produced during this period. As a result, the contrast between Hispanophone and Anglophone Caribbean literature has not been thoroughly investigated. In this essay, I will compare and contrast themes from “Viaje a la Semilla” by Cuban author Alejo Carpentier, “Do Angels Wear Brassieres?” by Jamaican author Olive Senior, and “Pressure Drop” by Jamaican author Oku Onuora. I will also briefly discuss works by Afro-Cuban author Nicolás Guillén and Saint Lucian Derek Walcott. Aspects of these works—such as intended audience, political and social influences, and linguistic form—are investigated. Additionally, Caribbean literature is analyzed through the lens of magical realism. The throughline of this study is whether thematically metaphysical questions of belonging which have been attributed to Caribbean literature by previous scholars are maintained in both linguistic traditions. The import of this literature to explore and maintain cultural byways in the face of a diasporic experience is emphasized.

Introduction: “The Unexpected Caribbean” Part II

Introduction: “The Unexpected Caribbean” Part II

“Through some kind of veil”: Queering Race and the Maternal in Patricia Powell’sThe Pagoda

AbstractPatricia Powell’s The Pagoda, published in 1998, is an aesthetic actualization of the in-betweenness of Jamaica’s purported self-definition as diasporic, hybrid, multiple. Jamaica, as with many countries in the Caribbean that withstood and resisted their respective European colonizing nations, is a site that makes visible its histories of Indigenous servitude and genocide, the importing of African slaves and subsequent indentured laborers from Asia, and the continuous presence of hegemonic systems of repressive and ideological powers. Taking place in 1893, after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire but well before Jamaican independence, Powell’s novel harkens back to Olive Senior’s parrot that finds itself caught between what was, what is, and the unavoidable shifts wrought by the invasion that is the British Empire (Senior 2005). Inasmuch as Senior’s parrot can be read as a reflection of Jamaica’s diasporic, hybrid, and multiple self-definition, I turn to Powell’s characters—specifically her protagonists Lowe and Miss Sylvie—to consider what purpose such an in-between can serve. I begin by arguing for a reading of Lowe as one who brings to the forefront the tensions of colonial logic by virtue of his race, gender, and sexuality, none of which are easily categorized, or indeed, easily known. I propose that, by situating Lowe, a Chinese Jamaican, both within and outside expected codes of racialized, gendered, and sexualized behaviors, The Pagoda lays bare the ways in which colonial logic—manifesting as demands for purity and order—derails any move toward liberation. If Lowe functions as the primary conduit of this argument, I contend that Miss Sylvie, his wife, offers an alternative venue for radical possibilities that fall outside the rigid conventions of 1890s Jamaica, a Black maternal that is always already the queer maternal, what I call in this article the “Black queer maternal”—a maternal that does not rely on reproduction, either literal or figurative, as its raison d’être. Powell challenges the colonial logic of discrete identity markers and categorizations in Lowe’s adopted country of residence, not to reverse it but to illuminate the unexpected possibilities that arise from the space of refusal, and the space of the diasporic, hybrid, multiple that is Jamaica.

The 'Catastrophic Consciousness of Backwardness': Culture and Dependency Theory in Latin America and the Caribbean

This article examines the relationship between economic and cultural dependency. Its analysis is framed by Enrique Dussel's methodological insistence on the international transfer of surplus value as the essence of dependency. Beginning with an examination of the heyday of classical dependency theory in Latin America and the Caribbean in the 1960s and 1970s, the article moves on to consider the increasing importance accorded culture as a site of power and struggle, focusing on the work of Sylvia Wynter. The second half of the article turns to the literary registration of dependency. Arguing that literary works can provide a barometric reading of the pressures of underdevelopment in advance of political-economic analyses, I consider Patrícia Galvão's Parque Industrial (1933) and Olive Senior's 'Boxed-In' (2015). Published, respectively, some forty years either side of the heyday of dependency theory, these paradigmatic fictions are examples of both the diagnostic and active role of literature in responding to the depredations of dependency.

Creolization as Cultural and Poetical Rebirth in “Arrival of the Snake-Woman” by Olive Senior

This article examines cultural and poetical rebirth in Olive Senior’s short story “Arrival of the Snake-Woman” (1989). It delves into the difficulties caused by the permanent rebirth of identities and cultures in migration and studies the role of the short story in the renewal of oral practices, with a narration in vernacular speech that anchors it deeply in Caribbean oral traditions.

Subjection and Resistance: Landscapes, Gardens, Myths and Vestigial Presences in Olive Senior's Gardening in the Tropics

This paper argues that a selection of Caribbean writers has engaged an aesthetic that spotlights the idea of a living or divine landscape through a deployment of folkloric, mythological, magical or spiritual epistemological frames. This aesthetic foregrounds the expansive possibilities of nature and other life forms in the wake of empire and global modernity. By an engagement with these tools, the creative writer deconstructs the limits of colonial ecological damage and modern-day agricultural devastation, while simultaneously affirming the Caribbean landscape as an active and creative agent within articulations of community and belonging. Through a blend of eco-criticism as examined by Elizabeth DeLoughrey and Wilson Harris's formulations of the "living landscapes" and Caribbean mythologies, this essay seeks to interrogate the manner in which Caribbean poet, Olive Senior, consciously deploys the literary imagination as a platform to plant seeds of reform and activism in the trail of environmental destruction. Senior accomplishes this through notions of mythic time and space that are unfettered by monolithic ideologies and linearity. This signposts an effort to posit a reliance on a spirit-infused universe—a deeply felt ideology which is pivotal to acts of environmental healing and societal recuperation.

Petrona Morrison. Review of "John Dunkley: Neither Day nor Night" by David Boxer, John Dunkley, Diana Nawi, Olive Senior, and Nicole Smythe-Johnson.

Petrona Morrison. Review of "John Dunkley: Neither Day nor Night" by David Boxer, John Dunkley, Diana Nawi, Olive Senior, and Nicole Smythe-Johnson.

An interview with Olive Senior

Olive Senior has become a significant literary voice within Caribbean literature and the Caribbean diaspora, often providing light, sharp, subtle, and emotionally laden stories and poems of childhood and belonging. As she describes here, her work remains “embedded” in Jamaica, including its soundscape and its ecology, and stretches across fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and children’s literature. For decades she has enjoyed a growing international audience, and her work is taught in schools in the Caribbean as part of an evolving literary curriculum. Senior’s short stories, the primary focus of this discussion, are especially well known for their enchanting, vibrant, and insightful children and child narrators — a trait that situates Senior’s work in relation to other famed Caribbean authors (Sam Selvon, Michael Anthony, Jamaica Kincaid, Merle Collins, and many more). In this interview, explorations of some of her young female voices are set within Denise DeCairns Narain’s sense of Senior’s “oral poetics”, and are also explored in relation to issues of wealth, privilege, and emotional sincerity. Senior’s work — fictional and non-fictional — is also heavily invested in ideas of land, labour, and migrancy, and so her recent and striking short story “Coal”, from her latest collection The Pain Tree (2015), is considered alongside her enormously impressive historical study of the role of West Indian migrant labourers in the building of the Panama Canal, entitled Dying to Better Themselves (2014).

Current Bibliography

Current Bibliography Natalie Gerber and Lisa Goldfarb Books Eeckhout, Bart, and Lisa Goldfarb, editors. Poetry and Poetics after Wallace Stevens. Bloomsbury, 2017. Meares, Russell. The Poet’s Voice in the Making of Mind. Routledge, 2016. Book Chapters Altieri, Charles. “How John Ashbery Modified Stevens’ Uses of ‘As.’” Poetry and Poetics after Wallace Stevens, edited by Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb, Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 183–99. Cleghorn, Angus. “Moving the ‘Moo’ from Stevensian Blank Verse: Elizabeth Bishop’s Use of Prose.” Poetry and Poetics after Wallace Stevens, edited by Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb, Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 57–72. Cocola, Jim. “Modernism on the Mountaintop: Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams.” Places in the Making: A Cultural Geography of American Poetry, U of Iowa P, 2016, pp. 27–41. Costello, Bonnie. “Frost or Stevens? Servants of Two Masters.” Poetry and Poetics after Wallace Stevens, edited by Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb, Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 13–26. Eeckhout, Bart. “Hearing Stevens in Sylvia Plath.” Poetry and Poetics after Wallace Stevens, edited by Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb, Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 43–56. Eeckhout, Bart, and Lisa Goldfarb. “Introduction: After Stevens.” Poetry and Poetics after Wallace Stevens, edited by Eeckhout and Goldfarb, Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 1–11. Filreis, Al. “The Stevens Wars.” Poetry and Poetics after Wallace Stevens, edited by Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb, Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 137–56. Galvin, Rachel. “‘This Song Is for My Foe’: Olive Senior and Terrance Hayes Rewrite Stevens.” Poetry and Poetics after Wallace Stevens, edited by Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb, Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 229–43. Goldfarb, Lisa. “Stevens’ Musical Legacy: ‘The Huge, High Harmony.’” Poetry and Poetics after Wallace Stevens, edited by Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb, Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 157–70. Jenkins, Lee M. “The Strands of Modernism: Stevens beside the Seaside.” Poetry and Poetics after Wallace Stevens, edited by Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb, Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 27–42. Lensing, George S. “Stevens and Seamus Heaney.” Poetry and Poetics after Wallace Stevens, edited by Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb, Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 103–15. Malkin, Rachel. “‘The California Fruit of the Ideal’: Stevens and Robert Hass.” Poetry and Poetics after Wallace Stevens, edited by Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb, Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 245–58. [End Page 147] Miller, J. Hillis. “Western Theories of Poetry: Reading Wallace Stevens’s ‘The Motive for Metaphor.’” Thinking Literature across Continents, by Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller, Duke UP, 2016, pp. 93–110. Nesme, Axel. “Henri Michaux’s Elsewhere through the Lens of Stevens’ Poetic Theory.” Poetry and Poetics after Wallace Stevens, edited by Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb, Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 73–88. Phillips, Doug. “Strange Interludes: Wallace Stevens and the Theatrical Event.” Text & Presentation, 2015, edited by Graley Herren, McFarland, 2016, pp. 108–30. Quinn, Justin. “Stevens across the Iron Curtain.” Poetry and Poetics after Wallace Stevens, edited by Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb, Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 89–102. Ragg, Edward. “The Not So Noble Rider: Stevens, Oppen, Glück.” Poetry and Poetics after Wallace Stevens, edited by Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb, Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 117–35. Richardson, Joan. “‘Ghostlier Demarcations, Keener Sounds’: Stevens, Susan Howe, and the Souls of the Labadie Tract.” Poetry and Poetics after Wallace Stevens, edited by Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb, Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 171–81. Sherman, David. “Coda: Williams and Stevens, Inventing Farewell.” In a Strange Room: Modernism’s Corpses and Mortal Obligation, Oxford UP, 2014, pp. 194–204. Steinman, Lisa M. “Unanticipated Readers.” Poetry and Poetics after Wallace Stevens, edited by Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb, Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 217–28. Utard, Juliette. “Silly to Be Serious: Lateness and the Question of Late Style in Stevens and A. R. Ammons.” Poetry and Poetics after Wallace Stevens, edited by Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb, Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 201–16. Zapf, Hubert. “Cultural Ecology of Literature: Literature as Cultural Ecology.” Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology, edited by Zapf, de Gruyter, 2016, pp. 135–54. Articles Bacigalupo, Massimo. “Ethical Criticism and Models of U.S. Poetry.” Forum for World Literature Studies, vol. 8, no. 2, June 2016, pp. 192–201. ———. “La ‘pace separata’ del poeta americano.” Quaderni di Palazzo Serra, no. 28, 2015, pp. 193...

Olive Senior’s The Pain Tree: Tales of Flight and of Belonging

(2016). Olive Senior’s The Pain Tree: Tales of Flight and of Belonging. Caribbean Quarterly: Vol. 62, Caribbean Literary Archives, pp. 478-488.

Precocious labrish: The girl-child narrative voice as short story poetics in the works of Marie Lily Cerat, Pamela Mordecai and Jennifer Rahim

Abstract This article analyses short stories by Pamela Mordecai (Jamaica), Jennifer Rahim (Trinidad) and Marie Lily Cerat (Haiti) to theorize ‘precocious labrish’ as the most significant stylistic trend in short story writing among Caribbean women. Precocious labrish encapsulates the dominant presence of the prepubescent and pubescent girl, as well as the young woman as the narrative voice, critic and commentator, and in some instances consciousness, in her stories. The article harnesses the positive connotation of ‘Precocious’ and recovers the Jamaican vernacular term ‘labrish’, to characterize the loquaciousness of young girls in these works as an affirmative inscription of a decidedly subversive female presence. Always with an interrogative turn, the girl narrators in the stories considered here confront some pressing questions that emerge about Caribbean culture and social imperatives. In that way, the writers extend an established stylistic element of short story writing to tackle fresh questions and offer heightened attention to others initiated earlier, and to extend a poetics of short story writing established by writers such as Olive Senior and Jamaica Kincaid.

Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories by Lucy Evans, and: Market Aesthetics: The Purchase of the Past in Caribbean Diasporic Fiction by Elena Machado Sáez

Reviewed by: Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories by Lucy Evans, and: Market Aesthetics: The Purchase of the Past in Caribbean Diasporic Fiction by Elena Machado Sáez Karen Fay Yaworski (bio) Lucy Evans. Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2014. Postcolonialism Across the Disciplines 16. Pp. x, 230. £75.00. Elena Machado Sáez. Market Aesthetics: The Purchase of the Past in Caribbean Diasporic Fiction. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2015. Pp. 249. US$65.00. Lucy Evans’ Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories and Elena Machado Sáez’s Market Aesthetics: The Purchase of the Past in Caribbean Diasporic Fiction both ask how Caribbean fictions, including diasporic ones, articulate community and belonging at local and global levels, how internal tensions animate those communities, and how fictional texts formally manifest the social, political, and aesthetic problematics that concern these writers. Evans’ book offers an insightful analysis of how community is conceptualized in eight contemporary Anglophone Caribbean short story collections and cycles. Machado Sáez analyzes contemporary Caribbean diasporic historical fiction as a transnational literary trend and demonstrates how writers negotiate the tension between a postcolonial imperative to ethically depict Caribbean history and subjectivities and market pressures informed by readers’ expectations. In Communities, Evans argues that “the form of interconnected stories is a crucial part of these writers’ imagining of communities which may be fractured, plural and fraught with tensions, but which nevertheless hold together” (2). The grounds for this unity and the various axes of difference that challenge it are central concerns throughout Evans’ book, which draws on literary, cultural, and anthropological studies as well as on musical traditions. The theoretically dense introduction discusses the demographics and histories of Trinidad, Jamaica, and Guyana; surveys theoretical models of Caribbean community; offers a history of the Caribbean short story; and identifies the limitations of short story genre theory. Evans suggests that Edward Glissant’s, Wilson Harris’, and Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s models of association across difference are applicable to “the narrative structure of a short story collection or cycle made up of episodes at once discrete and interrelated” (23). She finds division and unity at many layers of Caribbean society, echoing a prevailing trope in Caribbean studies while refusing to privilege unity, as many studies do. She sees division and unity reflected in the short story form and celebrates [End Page 187] Caribbean writers’ “subtle and complex modes of working through differences without erasing them” (20). Evans’ discussion can likewise be commended for how it illustrates the range of dynamic, complex ways Caribbean writers articulate community without collapsing these into a single or simplified conclusion. The book’s four chapters engage with progressively larger communities, moving from rural to urban, then national, and finally global diasporic collectivities. Chapters One and Two explore works by Olive Senior, Earl Lovelace, Kwame Dawes, and Alecia McKenzie. Evans contends that Senior and Lovelace formally combine modernist conventions with oral storytelling strategies in order to “portray the internal fracture and the heterogeneity characterising Caribbean rural communities more effectively than is possible … [in] traditional ethnography” (46–47). Furthermore, she argues that the short story form “facilitates a [distinct] mode of ethnography” (65) in creating a “multivocal rendering of community” (66). A similar pattern of argumentation emerges in Chapter Two, wherein anthropology loses a competition with literature. Edwidge Danticat and David Chariandy, both cited in Market Aesthetics, resist reader assumptions that fiction set in the developing world functions as social scientific research.1 Evans’ argument celebrates fiction’s capacity to offer more nuanced renderings of community than social science but nonetheless assesses fiction as a social scientific intervention, thereby submitting authors to the pressures Danticat and Chariandy object to. This contradiction notwithstanding, Evans illustrates literature’s capacity for imagining community in ways that anthropology cannot. Evans’ treatment of anthropology at times fails to acknowledge the very different objectives, audiences, methods, and conditions of production that the discipline involves. For example, when she highlights “the capacity of … short story collections or cycles … to incorporate a range of sometimes incompatible perspectives and subject positions; a task which is difficult, although not impossible, within the format of an anthropological study” (28), she submits the...

Dying to Better Themselves: West Indians and the Building of the Panama Canal, written by Olive Senior

Dying to Better Themselves: West Indians and the Building of the Panama Canal, written by Olive Senior

Dying to better themselves: West Indians and the building of the Panama Canal

Olive Senior, Dying to Better Themselves: West Indians and the Building of the Panama Canal. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2014. 440 pp.over a century ago, my great-uncle Charles Ledgister left Mountainside, Jamaica, for Panama to seek his fortune working on the canal. Unlike the many who died in the quest to better themselves that Olive Senior chronicles, or the Colon men who returned - with or without brass chains and pocket watches - he settled there and his descendants are still there. Reading Senior's account, I can only wonder if it was great-uncle Charles who was the Jamaican worker who had the chutzpah to chat freely with Theodore Roosevelt when the US president visited the canal (198).Senior tells us the story of the West Indians who went to Panama to work on the two canal projects - De Lesseps's abortive French plan in the 1880s and Theodore Roosevelt's successful American enterprise in the early years of the twentieth century - their different fates, and their relationships with their homelands and the great powers that dominated their lives. The vast majority of the West Indian migrants to Panama, Senior points out, were people like my great-uncle from the countryside (340) with little or no experience of the modern world. They were thrust into a wholly new world.What Senior says is that the West Indians who went to Panama shaped that country - Without them, modern Panama would not exist (xvii) - but also shaped the cultures and identities of their homelands. The experience of Panama was to be crucial for the definition of the modern Anglophone Caribbean in a wide variety of ways. Panama-born West Indians back in the West Indies proper included George Headley, born in Colon, who is, as Senior judiciously states, widely regarded as one of the greatest cricketers of all time (274), and Dudley Thompson, whose middle initial she incorrectly gives as H rather than J (his middle name was Joseph), whose distinguished career in law, politics, and diplomacy she briefly mentions.To get to the Headleys and Thompsons - and Thompson's father, a schoolteacher in Panama, moved back to Jamaica in order to have his children grow up in a place where they could live in dignity without constant exposure to American-style racism - we have to consider the facts of life during the construction and operation of the great canal. This involved not only the massive operation with its concomitant wastage of human life, which Senior describes in careful detail, but the imposition, once Theodore Roosevelt established the Canal Zone and the work of building the American canal began, of the Jim Crow system under another name: that is, the classification of people into the categories of Gold (white American) and Silver (non-white, non-American) according to the currency in which they were paid. Gold employees and their families were treated with consideration and humanity. Silver employees - and black West Indians were Silver - had far less.Senior makes clear that the Gold and Silver system discriminated between white Americans on the one hand, and non-Americans on the other, but placed black West Indians at the bottom of the heap. Even when they were doing the same work, black West Indians faced invidious discrimination: More than nine thousand skilled West Indians were employed in 1914, classified as 'artisans' while Americans doing the same work were classified as 'skilled mechanics', reflected in their respective pay (185). …

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

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.”

Crosstalk: Canadian and Global Imaginaries in Dialogue ed. by Diane Brydon and Marta Dvořák (review)

Diane Brydon and Marta Dvorak, editors. Crosstalk: Canadian and Global Imaginarles in Dialogue. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier up, 2012. 321 pp. $85.00. Crosstalk: Canadian and Global Imaginarles in Dialogue originated in conference at Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris called and Vision: Situating Canadian Culture Globally in 2008. Editors Diane Brydon and Marta Dvorak have ably assembled papers from conference address abiding concerns of conference and especially notion of that gives book its title. Brydon and Dvorak declare that they are interested in how readers negotiate meaning in contexts where norms of understandings diverge, that is, how different subjects might interpret similar materials across different settings. For editors, these settings are ones that are shaped in particular by notion of globalization, by movements across and through different nation-states and subject positionings. The rubric for understanding these interactions is what they term crosstalk, which they see metaphor for ways in which audial and visual imaginaries interact create complex forms of interference. The editors focus on Canada, including Quebec, as means of focusing on forms of that can, in some way, be situated partly in relation Canada but that also extend beyond such borderings. They see crosstalk, in particular, continuous, ongoing, and co-constructing activity that relentlessly performs unbordering, resulting in a field where Canadian may not disappear but may well become destabilized and rearticulated. While such notion of provides overall framework for engagements found in volume, subsidiary concerns also structure book, particularly those of crosstalk, improvisation; dialogism, polyphony, voice; and space, place, and circulation. Brydon and Dvorak set an ambitious agenda for understanding functioning of transnational flows in literary context in Canada, one that remains clearly in editors' focus. The contributors volume respond this structure in variety of ways. Writer Olive Senior opens volume with consideration of the importance of voice and in her practice. Voice and vision enable Senior consider how colonial and postcolonial movements between her youth in Jamaica and her being situated in Canada influence her writing. This meditation builds on address that Senior gave during initial conference and provides an opening book that is situated within creative practice, thereby complementing theoretical concerns of editors in their introduction. Section one of book, focusing on concerns of collaboration, crosstalk, and improvisation, documents literary practices that might fall aslant of more frequently studied aspects of Canadian cultural work. Ajay Heble and Winfried Siemerling collaboratively produce chapter on their ongoing Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice project, project that focuses particularly on how improvisation--often within context of jazz--impacts cultural practice. For them, reading through writers like Michael Ondaatje and Wayde Compton, jazz and mixing might provide metaphors for discourse that can demonstrate political potential in crossing of borders. Similarly, Daniel Coleman argues, in following chapter on David Chariandy's novel Soucouyant and Lee Maracle's novel Daughters Are Forever, that these two texts' use of notion of melancholia to describe residual effects of colonial trauma might allow for productive conversation between Caribbean diasporic and Salish Indigenous contexts. Coleman's goal of generating an epistemological crosstalk demonstrates Brydon and Dvorak's proposed methodology being put work politically significant ends. Ric Knowles's subsequent contribution focuses on work of Monique Mojica and work-shopping of her performance pieces in order read for ways in which theatre might help suture wounds inflicted by colonization. …

Establishing an Australian/Caribbean Alliance: Stories Passed on by Penny van Toorn and Olive Senior

Brings the work of Caribbean poet and Australian scholar Penny van Toorn into conversation. 'Given van Toom's emphasis on the tactics of Indigenous engagement with the dominant ( colonising) culture, Senior's notion of an ambushed pen provides a nice point of connection between two story-tellers and the marginalised cultures with which they engage.'