Divided Allegiances and Alternative Histories

The second chapter examines psychological transnationalism in novels by Michelle Cliff and Margaret Cezair-Thompson. As the works illustrate, psychological exile is an essential part of the migratory experience; growing up with divided allegiances, each cognizant of their difference at every turn, the protagonists, Jean and Clare, are primed for flight. The authors highlight the effects of personal violence and advance alternative histories that have been lost in contemporary Jamaica. In Abeng and The True History of Paradise, migration is provoked by circumstances that render the homeland unsafe or unbearable; violence and interpersonal conflict operate as precursors to the female characters’ immigration. Together, the works query the degree to which one can fully “depart” one’s homeland.

Radical Interdisciplinarity

This essay delineates the concept of radical interdisciplinarity, the use of methodologies that combine traditional scholarship with that which is not traditionally considered either scholarship or even part of an academic discipline—specifically poetry and other creative arts. The author describes radical interdisciplinarity as building on the hybrid methodologies of women of color authors such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Michelle Cliff, who often combined memoir with fiction or poetry. The essay itself includes examples of radical interdisciplinarity in the form of a critical biomythography that weaves together scholarly analysis and poetry related to the author’s current research on the jamette women of nineteenth-century Trinidad.

Cultivating Correspondences; or, Other Gestures of Belonging

Transnationalism is not the exclusive province of globe-trotting authors, but also includes the practices of those who could not access the means of transatlantic mobility. This chapter begins by considering Bessie Head's exilic life and her quest for belonging that motivated the grounded transnationalism she expressed. It then investigates one of its most exemplary practices: her letter writing, with particular attention to the set of letters between Head and her four African American correspondents: Nikki Giovanni, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Michelle Cliff. Some of their epistolary exchanges and writing published around the same period feature repeated references to gardens, whose political and imaginative implications are considered at length. The chapter concludes by framing the practice of letter writing as a form of cultivation that re-centers our attention on the labor that transnational engagement requires, even as it yields a whole spectrum of outcomes.

Constructive Engagements

This chapter considers the outcomes of some interactions among black South African and African American writers discussed in preceding chapters, but “updated” here in the context of the 1980s. It explores how earlier transnational engagements led to a series of subsequent texts and interpersonal relationships as the global antiapartheid movement began to reach its apex. Those works—by Richard Rive, Michelle Cliff, Audre Lorde, and Gwendolyn Brooks—attest to the impress of earlier writers (Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Keorapetse Kgositsile, and Bessie Head) and, by returning us to the matter of cultural influence, point to the considerable role South Africa and its writers played in shaping African American writerly imaginations. Furthermore, it is argued that Cliff's poem “Constructive Engagement” plays with the name of the Reagan-era U.S. foreign policy toward South Africa to powerful effect.

Vexed Relations: The Interplay of Culture, Race, and Sex

This chapter considers the work of three Caribbean writers Michelle Cliff, Oonya Kempadoo, and Christian Campbell, who grapple with the complexity of culture, race, and sex within the overwhelming context of neocolonial tourism and globalization. Cliff’s novel No Telephone to Heaven represents post-independence Jamaica from the 1960s to the 1980s during the rise of tourism as the model for development. The novel carefully exposes the exploitative cultural and sexual consumption of the Caribbean through representing the ways in which Jamaica and its people are packaged and sold in the film and tourist industries. Kempadoo’s novel’s Tide Running offers a seductive challenge to neocolonialism through a sharp critique of the sexual and cultural politics of tourism and the adverse effects of globalization on the island of Tobago. Through subtle and powerful metaphors, Campbell’s poems, “Groove” and “Welcome Centre” reveal the profound influence of tourism on Caribbean sexual and cultural identity, unsilencing the sexual/gendered aspects of tourist exploitation in the Bahamas.