| dc.description.abstract | “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. | pl_PL |
