Undoing the History of the Engendered N ation in Three Narratives of Caribbean Feminism

The chapter was published in "Episodes from a History of Undoing: The Heritage of Female Subversiveness" edited by Reghina Dascăl“Nation and nationalism” are most debated topics in contemporary Caribbean theory. Understandably questions of national coming-intobeing, cultural emancipation and the emergence of national consciousness were of paramount importance for all West Indian literatures in the nationalist period from the 1950s to 1970s. Since at that time authorship was considered to be mostly a masculine enterprise, it is not surprising that the majority of national narratives fundamental to the national formation were authored by male writers. All of them consistently overlooked issues of gender and insisted on seeing freedom in terms of patriarchal rhetoric that equated colonialism with emasculation and liberty with free expression of patriarchal desires. In the 1980s and 1990s, when the fiist narratives of Caribbean feminism entered West Indian discourse, the ethos of nationalism came under serious scrutiny from debutant female writers. Their texts, I will argue, criticize the gendered configuration of nationalism and demystify nationalist discourses by showing that they masked gender complexities and inequalities in West Indian societies