Feminist Africa 7.indd

This essay adds to the ongoing dialogue on the literary representation of Caribbean women. It grapples with a range of issues: how has iconic literary representation of the Caribbean woman altered from the inception of Caribbean women’s writing to the present? Given that literary representation was a tool for inscribing otherness and a counter-discursive device for recuperating the self from the imprisoning gaze, how do the politics of identity, ethnicity and representation play out over time? How does representation shift when one considers the gender and ethnicity of the protagonist in relation to that of the writer? Can we assume that self-representation is necessarily the most “authentic”? And how has the configuration of the representative West Indian writer changed since the 1970s to the present? The problematics of literary representation have been with us since Plato and Aristotle wrestled with the purpose of fiction and the role of the artist in the ideal republic. Its problematics were foregrounded in feminist dialogues on the power of the male gaze to objectify and subordinate women. These problematics were also central to so-called third-world and post-colonial critics concerned with the correlation between imperialism and the projection/ internalisation of the gaze which represented the subaltern as sub-human. Representation has always been a pivotal issue in female-authored Caribbean literature, with its nagging preoccupation with identity formation, which must be read through myriad shifting filters of gender and ethnicity. Under any circumstance, representation remains a vexing theoretical issue. W. J. T. Mitchell alludes to three forms of representational relationships identified by semioticians – icon, symbol and index. Mimesis and imitation are iconic forms of representation that transcend differences between media. For instance, an avocado may represent a woman. Symbolic forms of representation are arbitrary and based on convention. Language, for example, is based on a system of signs to which we arbitrarily assign meaning. We need to agree Fashioning women for a brave new world: gender, ethnicity and literary representation Paula Morgan