College of Arts & Humanities

Careless Whispers: How we lost mid-century Caribbean women writers in Naipaul's & Walcott's age

College of Arts & Humanities | School of Critical Studies | ARC Public | Black History Month
Date: Thursday 03 October 2024
Time: 17:00 - 19:00
Venue: Advanced Research Centre
Category: Student events
Speaker: Alison Donnell
Website: www.eventbrite.com/e/how-we-lost-mid-century-caribbean-women-writers-in-naipauls-walcotts-age-tickets-1004725449867

Professor Alison Donnell is Head of the School of Humanities and Professor of Modern Literatures in English at the University of Bristol. Her recent works reflect her ongoing commitment to exploring and expanding literary histories, including a special double issue of Caribbean Quarterly on Caribbean Literary Archives and her General Editorship of Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1800-2020 (3 volumes)(2021) with Cambridge University Press. Her latest monograph Creolized Sexualities: Undoing Heteronormativity in the literary imagination of the Anglo-Caribbean was published in Rutgers’ Critical Caribbean Series in 2022. Her edited A-Z of Neglected Caribbean Writers will be published with Papillote Press in 2025.

Full Lecture Title; 'Careless Whispers. How we lost mid-century Caribbean women writers in the age of Naipaul and Walcott’

ABSTRACT

HIDDEN FIGURES: tracing the remarkable Caribbean women who adventured and rebelled and wrote marvellous stories in the age of Naipaul and Walcott but who were never recognized as women writers.

Hiding just behind the Windrush story of how Caribbean writing bloomed in the mid-century thanks to the brilliance of migrant male novelists who were writing and broadcasting in the colonial metropolis of London, we can find a number of talented women writers who might well have achieved equal acclaim as V.S. Naipaul and Samuel Selvon had they enjoyed the same opportunities and support.

Unfound in histories to date, bringing these women back into view not only offers a chance to tell a much fuller story of Caribbean writing but also to highlight the challenges that faced these determined and talented women in bringing their writing into view, as well as how they engaged in both individual and national struggles at a time of shifting gender and cultural expectations.

As well as being gifted writers with meaningful stories to tell, Edwina Melville and Monica Skeete all led audacious and remarkable lives – pushing back against the colonial script of middle-class feminine domestic fulfilment, investing in their professional accomplishments, and devoting themselves to the cultural development of their nations in the making. They also all had very different lives from the migrant male authors we identify with this period, and importantly they had different aspirations too – with a shared and demonstrable commitment to producing a body of writing that would enrich descriptions of and for Caribbean people in the region.

Organised by the Postcolonial Research cluster.

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