I Rather Dead: A Spivakian Reading of Indo-Caribbean Women’s Narratives

Within the already colonized and marginalized Indo-Caribbean communities, Indo-Caribbean women can be considered a discriminated group, and their (self-)representation may be analyzed as subaltern speech. This book discusses fiction and other stories of Indo-Caribbean women, concentrating on their attempts to rewrite ‘regulative psychobiographies’, as the postcolonial feminist critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls traditional narratives dominating women’s lives. Attempting to bear witness to gender, race, and class differences, this analysis interrogates how the attempted self-expression is mediated, retrieved and read by others. It also demonstrates that depending on the position and power of the parties involved, intervention into oppressive scripts can assume very different forms. The author believes that recognition of all the different forms of speaking — through words, silences, languages, actions, bodies, etc. — can help to make the intervention happen and the subaltern voice heard. For any scholar researching on the feminist or postcolonial aspects of Caribbean women’s writings this analysis by Dorota Goluch will act as an indispensible companion.