Elsewhere in the City
Contesting the incongruity between Caribbean migrant women and the modern city
In this groundbreaking examination of literary narratives of Caribbean women’s migration, Dawn Fulton reveals their authors’ intentions to correct stereotypes that frame the Caribbean woman as out of place in the city. Elsewhere in the City examines depictions of New York, Toronto, London, Paris, and Montreal in the works of such authors as Edwidge Danticat, Angie Cruz, Gisèle Pineau, Nalo Hopkinson, Esmeralda Santiago, and Andrea Levy. These authors, Fulton shows, use the figure of the Caribbean migrant woman as an urban foil who recuperates the city’s disavowed temporal and spatial landscapes, illuminating the formative role of nature, domestic labor, plantation economies, and the colonial past in the urban landscapes of the Global North. Bringing together texts from the anglophone, hispanophone, and francophone Caribbean, Elsewhere in the City demonstrates how centering Caribbean migrant women’s experiences can transform understandings of urban ecology.
- Maeve McCusker, Queen's University Belfast, author of Fictions of Whiteness: Imagining the Planter Caste in the French Caribbean NovelFulton shows how the diaspora of Caribbean women living in prosperous Northern cities has contested and expanded understandings and conceptualizations of the urban. The quality of textual analysis is consistently compelling and exceptionally eloquent. This is a profoundly ethical criticism that pays unerring attention to the complex interwoven experiences of class, race, gender, generation and age, as well as to the looming shadows of the plantationocene and the (connected) contemporary climate emergency. The book makes a meaningful and distinctive contribution to a variety of fields.
Dawn Fulton is Professor of French Studies at Smith College and the author of Signs of Dissent: Maryse Condé and Postcolonial Criticism.
