Fictions of Feminine Citizenship

Book excerpt: Fictions of Feminine Citizenship charts an alternative history of racial and sexual formation in the Caribbean. It examines the ways in which the socialization of female sexuality and the violence of sexual intimacies have mattered to imperialist and nationalist understandings and practices of citizenship. The book moves across historical periods and national contexts ranging from nineteenth-century indentureship in Jamaica to early twentieth-century American military intervention in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Trinidad. Through an interdisciplinary and comparative study of novels by contemporary diasporic Caribbean women writers, Donette Francis demonstrates that the sexual realities of women and girls challenge conventional regional histories. Francis defines this emergent feminist literature as “antiromance,” and argues that these novels contest the heteronormative model of coupling that underwrites constructions of home, family, nation, and diaspora in the Caribbean. Writing against the critical impulse to underscore women’s agency, Francis considers instead how Caribbean female subjects dwell in liminal spaces of both vulnerability and possibility.