Academic literature on the topic 'Caribbean Women poets'

This essay utilizes Helen Tiffin’s idea of canonical counter-discourse to read the Medusa poems of Shara McCallum and Dorothea Smartt, two female Caribbean poets. Essentially, canonical counter-discourse involves authors rewriting works or giving voice to peripheral/silenced characters from the literary canon to challenge inequalities upheld by power structures such as imperialism and patriarchy. McCallum’s and Smartt’s poems represent Medusa to reflect their own concerns as women of color from Jamaica and Barbados, respectively. McCallum’s “Madwoman as Rasta Medusa” aligns the titular character from her book Madwoman with Medusa to express Madwoman’s righteous anger at the “wanton” and “gravalicious” ways of a Babylon addressed in second person. Smartt’s series of Medusa poems from Connecting Medium explore the pain of hair and skin treatments Black women endure to try and meet Euro-centric beauty standards, as well as the struggles of immigrants, particularly people of color. Both poets claim Medusa as kindred, empowering Medusa as a figure with agency—which she is denied in the Greco-Roman sources—and simultaneously legitimizing both Caribbean literature and the poets’ feminist and post-colonial protests by linking them to the cultural capital of the classics.

This article examines the context and content of the 1936 Soviet Yiddish publication of Neger-Dikhtung in Amerike, which remains to this day the most extensive anthology of African-Diasporic poetry in Yiddish translation. The collection included a critical introduction and translations of nearly one hundred individual poems by twenty-nine poets, both men and women, from across the United States and the Caribbean. This article examines the anthology's position amongst different notions of “the folk” in Soviet Yiddish folkloristics and the relationship of these ideas to Yiddish-language discourse about race and racism, the writings of James Weldon Johnson and W.E.B. Du Bois, with whom Magidoff corresponded, and the Yiddish modernist poetry of Shmuel Halkin, who edited the book series in which the anthology appears. When placed alongside Du Bois's and others’ visits to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the appearance of African-American and Caribbean poetry in Yiddish translation shows how a transatlantic Jewish avant-garde interpreted and embedded itself within Soviet-African-American cultural exchange in the interwar years. Magidoff served as a Soviet correspondent for NBC and the Associated Press from 1935. He was accused of espionage and expelled from the USSR in 1948.

<p>This article explores the pedagogical foundations of three U.S. Black women writers—Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, and Audre Lorde—widely recognized as among the most influential and prolific writers of 20th century cultures of emancipation. Their distinct yet entwined legacies—as socialist feminists, people’s poets and novelists, community organizers, and innovative educators—altered the landscapes of multiple liberation movements from the late 1960s to the present, and offer a striking example of the possibilities of radical women’s intellectual friendships. The internationalist reverberations of Bambara, Jordan, and Lorde are alive and ubiquitous, even if to some readers today in the Caribbean and Latin America, their names may be unfamiliar.<a title="" href="file:///C:/Users/natal/Documents/MEGA/1-REVISTAS/Anuario/Anuario%2030-2018/Dossier/02%20Articulo%20Conor.docx#_ftn1">^{^[}</a></p><p>Bambara’s fiction centered Black and Third World women and children absorbing vibrant life lessons within societies structured to harm them. Her 1980 novel, The Salt Eaters, posed the question - “are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?” -to conjoin healing and resistance for a new embattled generation under President Reagan’s neoliberal shock doctrines that were felt worldwide. June Jordan’s salvos of essays, fiction, and poetry -including Things That I Do in the Dark, On Call, and Affirmative Acts - intervened in struggles around Black English, community control, police violence, sexual assault, and youth empowerment. Audre Lorde’s words are suffused across U.S. movements (and, increasingly, in the Caribbean and Latin America)- on signs, shirts, and memes, at #BlackLivesMatter and International Women’s Strike marches. Your silence will not protect you. The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Revolution is not a one-time event. However, her voluminous legacy may risk becoming a series of slogans, “the Audre Lorde that reads like a bumper sticker.”</p><div><br clear="all" /><hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><div><p> </p></div></div>

Abstract Myths of the sea are some of the most enduring cultural associations with oceanic spaces. In particular, literature written from islands and coastal locations often shares an interest in these mythic narratives. With a focus on this comparative element, this article investigates how contemporary poets from Ireland and from the Anglophone Caribbean engage with the myths of the sea in their work. It examines the poetry of Lorna Goodison (Jamaica), Seamus Heaney (Northern Ireland), Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (Republic of Ireland), and Derek Walcott (Saint Lucia), demonstrating the ways in which a contemporary engagement with the myths of the sea transforms and translates understandings not only of the present moment but also of traditional ideas of linear time. Specific myths of the sea become a tool with which to mine the past and present as they allow these poets to reflect on beginnings, endings, and the repetition of cycles. The critiques that these poets level in their work are also considered through a gendered lens here, as the association between woman and sea, as well as the mythologization of woman is discussed. This article analyzes key poems from these writers to draw out rarely evinced transatlantic routes of correspondence between the four poets. In doing so, it also emphasizes the connective properties of the sea’s cultural, artistic, and imaginative resonances.

Women face disturbing realities of repression in Western society, which are built, mainly, through the establishment of stereotypes. One of the main ways such repression takes place is through the limiting of women’s sexuality expression. In the Caribbean author Grace Nichols’s The Fat Black Woman’s Poems (1986), the fat black woman provides us with new images to deal with her sexuality and to understand it as more than the mere sexual through Audre Lorde’s concept of the erotic. In the poems, the fat black woman uses the erotic to empower herself and to question the system of patriarchy. By doing so points out the importance of sexual freedom for women to gain control of their own forms of representation and, ultimately, their own lives.

This essay argues for a comparative approach to studying and reading Black Caribbean women’s poetry. In particular, it focuses on the works of Cuban Soleida Ríos and Tobagonian Canadian M. NourbeSe Philip in their publications at the close of the 1980s. The essay asks, How does a recuperation of a poetics between Ríos and Philip enhance a study of the body? Through a close reading of two poems, it points to instances of absence and disappearance as generative signals that enable these women to transgress the silences that structure imaginative and lived experiences. In doing so, language, interiority, and grammar become critical spaces for readers to witness the transformative subjectivities that abound when journeying with these women’s poetry.

While “dub” poetry, a sub-genre of performance poetry, is a male-dominated field women dub poets have entered this field with the help of male poets and then gradually carved their place within the genre as independent contributors and established themselves as a resistant force. When women dub poets write about the issues of general politics, they are welcomed but when they focus on women’s problems and gender questions, domestic affairs they are often neglected and sometimes criticised. The question remains how could women, being the representatives of traditional domesticity can/ should adhere to address/ challenge/ use the ‘public’ platforms of performance surrendered and occupied by men. Even if one or two women do so, should they remain under the shadow of their male counterparts and follow the ideals directly or indirectly dictated by them or should they set their own terms? Through various modes of performance women poets often defy the male policy of exclusivity. While male dub poets make their own rules, women poets often disobey the male diktat. This paper wishes to explore how performances of African descended women poets, especially from the Caribbeans, recurringly engage in a dialogue challenging patriarchal poetic and performative elitism and how it often brings tabooed ideas, domesticity, and other areas of “women’s activity” into the forefront of literary arenas and in doing so they forward the genre to a more flexible, more adaptive, and richer form of poetic expression.

ABSTRACT: This article analyzes two recent poetry collections by queer Caribbean writers and probes them for what they can reveal about silence as a combined affective, aesthetic and political strategy. Both Kohnjehr Woman by Ana-Maurine Lara and While They Sleep by Raquel Salas Rivera encourage embodied reading practices that resist traditional literary analysis, understood as focused on achieving “mastery” and intellectual domination of a text, by engaging the reading body queerly and tangentially, and they ask what opportunities are presented by illegibility and untranslatability. I argue that these poems employ silence as a strategy either by creating visual/aural space on the page, refusing translation, or by requiring words to be vocalized in order to be cognitively understood. Following Doris Sommer and Édouard Glissant, this strategic refusal can be understood as a response to the lived experience of disaster within the postcolonial Caribbean and its diaspora that maintains opacity by refusing straightforward legibility, and at the same time allows for a fuller form of solidarity that centers embodied knowledge. Keywords: coloniality, opacity, poetry/poetics, queer, Latine/x, diaspora, translation, embodiment RESUMEN: Este artículo analiza dos colecciones de poesía recientes escritas por autores “queer,” e investiga lo que pueden revelar sobre el silencio como una estrategia afectiva, estética, y política. Tanto “Kohnjehr Woman” de Ana-Maurine Lara como “While They Sleep” de Raquel Salas Rivera animan prácticas encarnadas de lectura que resisten el análisis literario tradicional, entendido como algo enfocado en lograr dominio y control intelectual sobre el texto. Por el contrario, estas obras involucran al cuerpo del lector de manera “queer” y tangencial, y se cuestionan las oportunidades que nos presentan la ilegibilidad y la intraducibilidad. Argumento que estos poemas emplean el silencio como una estrategia o bien creando espacio visual/aural en la página, o bien negando traducción, o requiriendo que las palabras se vocalicen para ser entendidas cognitivamente. Siguiendo a Doris Sommer y Édouard Glissant, esta negación estratégica se puede entender como una respuesta a la experiencia vivida del desastre dentro del caribe poscolonial y su diáspora que mantiene su opacidad a través del rechazo de la legibilidad directa, lo que al mismo tiempo permite una forma más amplia de solidaridad que centraliza el conocimiento encarnado. Palabras claves: colonialidad, opacidad, poesía/poética, queer/cuir, Latine/x, diáspora, traducción, encarnación

Diaspora This article looks at diaspora through the transformations of an established public service broadcaster, the BBC World Service, by considering some of the findings of the AHRC-funded Tuning In: Contact Zones at the BBC World Service, which is part of the Diasporas, Migration and Identities program. Tuning In has six themes, each of which focuses upon the role of the BBC WS: The Politics of Translation, Diasporic Nationhood, Religious Transnationalism, Sport across Diasporas, Migrating Music and Drama for Development. The World Service, which was until 2011 funded by the Foreign Office, was set up to cater for the British diaspora and had the specific remit of transmitting ideas about Britishness to its audiences overseas. Tuning In demonstrates interrelationships between the global and the local in the diasporic contact zone of the BBC World Service, which has provided a mediated home for the worldwide British diaspora since its inception in 1932. The local and the global have merged, elided, and separated at different times and in different spaces in the changing story of the BBC (Briggs). The BBC WS is both local and global with activities that present Britishness both at home and abroad. The service has, however, come a long way since its early days as the Empire Service. Audiences for the World Service’s 31 foreign language services, radio, television, and Internet facilities include substantive non-British/English-speaking constituencies, rendering it a contact zone for the exploration of ideas and political opportunities on a truly transnational scale. This heterogeneous body of exilic, refugee intellectuals, writers, and artists now operates alongside an ongoing expression of Britishness in all its diverse reconfiguration. This includes the residual voice of empire and its patriarchal paternalism, the embrace of more recent expressions of neoliberalism as well as traditional values of impartiality and objectivism and, in the case of the arts, elements of bohemianism and creative innovation. The World Service might have begun as a communication system for the British ex-pat diaspora, but its role has changed along with the changing relationship between Britain and its colonial past. In the terrain of sport, for example, cricket, the “game of empire,” has shifted from Britain to the Indian subcontinent (Guha) with the rise of “Twenty 20” and the Indian Premier League (IPL); summed up in Ashis Nandy’s claim that “cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English” (Nandy viii). English county cricket dominated the airways of the World Service well into the latter half of the twentieth century, but the audiences of the service have demanded a response to social and cultural change and the service has responded. Sport can thus be seen to have offered a democratic space in which new diasporic relations can be forged as well as one in which colonial and patriarchal values are maintained. The BBC WS today is part of a network through which non-British diasporic peoples can reconnect with their home countries via the service, as well as an online forum for debate across the globe. In many regions of the world, it continues to be the single most trusted source of information at times of crisis and disaster because of its traditions of impartiality and objectivity, even though (as noted in the article on Al-Jazeera in this special issue) this view is hotly contested. The principles of objectivity and impartiality are central to the BBC WS, which may seem paradoxical since it is funded by the Commonwealth and Foreign office, and its origins lie in empire and colonial discourse. Archive material researched by our project demonstrates the specifically ideological role of what was first called the Empire Service. The language of empire was deployed in this early programming, and there is an explicit expression of an ideological purpose (Hill). For example, at the Imperial Conference in 1930, the service was supported in terms of its political powers of “strengthening ties” between parts of the empire. This view comes from a speech by John Reith, the BBC’s first Director General, which was broadcast when the service opened. In this speech, broadcasting is identified as having come to involve a “connecting and co-ordinating link between the scattered parts of the British Empire” (Reith). Local British values are transmitted across the globe. Through the service, empire and nation are reinstated through the routine broadcasting of cyclical events, the importance of which Scannell and Cardiff describe as follows: Nothing so well illustrates the noiseless manner in which the BBC became perhaps the central agent of national culture as its cyclical role; the cyclical production year in year out, of an orderly, regular progression of festivities, rituals and celebrations—major and minor, civic and sacred—that mark the unfolding of the broadcast year. (278; italics in the original) State occasions and big moments, including those directly concerned with governance and affairs of state, and those which focused upon sport and religion, were a big part in these “noiseless” cycles, and became key elements in the making of Britishness across the globe. The BBC is “noiseless” because the timetable is assumed and taken for granted as not only what is but what should be. However, the BBC WS has been and has had to be responsive to major shifts in global and local—and, indeed, glocal—power geometries that have led to spatial transformations, notably in the reconfiguration of the service in the era of postcolonialism. Some of these massive changes have involved the large-scale movement of people and a concomitant rethinking of diaspora as a concept. Empire, like nation, operates as an “imagined community,” too big to be grasped by individuals (Anderson), as well as a material actuality. The dynamics of identification are rarely linear and there are inconsistencies and disruptions: even when the voice is officially that of empire, the practice of the World Service is much more diverse, nuanced, and dialogical. The BBC WS challenges boundaries through the connectivities of communication and through different ways of belonging and, similarly, through a problematisation of concepts like attachment and detachment; this is most notable in the way in which programming has adapted to new diasporic audiences and in the reworkings of spatiality in the shift from empire to diversity via multiculturalism. There are tensions between diaspora and multiculturalism that are apparent in a discussion of broadcasting and communication networks. Diaspora has been distinguished by mobility and hybridity (Clifford, Hall, Bhaba, Gilroy) and it has been argued that the adjectival use of diasporic offers more opportunity for fluidity and transformation (Clifford). The concept of diaspora, as it has been used to explain the fluidity and mobility of diasporic identifications, can challenge more stabilised, “classic” understandings of diaspora (Chivallon). A hybrid version of diaspora might sit uneasily with a strong sense of belonging and with the idea that the broadcast media offer a multicultural space in which each voice can be heard and a wide range of cultures are present. Tuning In engaged with ways of rethinking the BBC’s relationship to diaspora in the twenty-first century in a number of ways: for example, in the intersection of discursive regimes of representation; in the status of public service broadcasting; vis-à-vis the consequences of diverse diasporic audiences; through the role of cultural intermediaries such as journalists and writers; and via global economic and political materialities (Gillespie, Webb and Baumann). Tuning In thus provided a multi-themed and methodologically diverse exploration of how the BBC WS is itself a series of spaces which are constitutive of the transformation of diasporic identifications. Exploring the part played by the BBC WS in changing and continuing social flows and networks involves, first, reconfiguring what is understood by transnationalism, diaspora, and postcolonial relationalities: in particular, attending to how these transform as well as sometimes reinstate colonial and patriarchal discourses and practices, thus bringing together different dimensions of the local and the global. Tuning In ranges across different fields, embracing cultural, social, and political areas of experience as represented in broadcasting coverage. These fields illustrate the educative role of the BBC and the World Service that is also linked to its particular version of impartiality; just as The Archers was set up to provide information and guidance through a narrative of everyday life to rural communities and farmers after the Second World War, so the Afghan version plays an “edutainment” role (Skuse) where entertainment also serves an educational, public service information role. Indeed, the use of soap opera genre such as The Archers as a vehicle for humanitarian and health information has been very successful over the past decade, with the “edutainment” genre becoming a feature of the World Service’s broadcasting in places such as Rwanda, Somalia, Nigeria, India, Nepal, Burma, Afghanistan, and Cambodia. In a genre that has been promoted by the World Service Trust, the charitable arm of the BBC WS uses drama formats to build transnational production relationships with media professionals and to strengthen creative capacities to undertake behaviour change through communication work. Such programming, which is in the tradition of the BBC WS, draws upon the service’s expertise and exhibits both an ideological commitment to progressive social intervention and a paternalist approach drawing upon colonialist legacies. Nowadays, however, the BBC WS can be considered a diasporic contact zone, providing sites of transnational intra-diasporic contact as well as cross-cultural encounters, spaces for cross-diasporic creativity and representation, and a forum for cross-cultural dialogue and potentially cosmopolitan translations (Pratt, Clifford). These activities are, however, still marked by historically forged asymmetric power relations, notably of colonialism, imperialism, and globalisation, as well as still being dominated by hegemonic masculinity in many parts of the service, which thus represent sites of contestation, conflict, and transgression. Conversely, diasporic identities are themselves co-shaped by media representations (Sreberny). The diasporic contact zone is a relational space in which diasporic identities are made and remade and contested. Tuning In employed a diverse range of methods to analyse the part played by the BBC WS in changing and continuing social and cultural flows, networks, and reconfigurations of transnationalisms and diaspora, as well as reinstating colonial, patriarchal practices. The research deconstructed some assumptions and conditions of class-based elitism, colonialism, and patriarchy through a range of strategies. Texts are, of course, central to this work, with the BBC Archives at Caversham (near Reading) representing the starting point for many researchers. The archive is a rich source of material for researchers which carries a vast range of data including fragile memos written on scraps of paper: a very local source of global communications. Other textual material occupies the less locatable cyberspace, for example in the case of Have Your Say exchanges on the Web. People also featured in the project, through the media, in cyberspace, and physical encounters, all of which demonstrate the diverse modes of connection that have been established. Researchers worked with the BBC WS in a variety of ways, not only through interviews and ethnographic approaches, such as participant observation and witness seminars, but also through exchanges between the service, its practitioners, and the researchers (for example, through broadcasts where the project provided the content and the ideas and researchers have been part of programs that have gone out on the BBC WS (Goldblatt, Webb), bringing together people who work for the BBC and Tuning In researchers). On this point, it should be remembered that Bush House is, itself, a diasporic space which, from its geographical location in the Strand in London, has brought together diasporic people from around the globe to establish international communication networks, and has thus become the focus and locus of some of our research. What we have understood by the term “diasporic space” in this context includes both the materialities of architecture and cyberspace which is the site of digital diasporas (Anderssen) and, indeed, the virtual exchanges featured on “Have Your Say,” the online feedback site (Tuning In). Living the Glocal The BBC WS offers a mode of communication and a series of networks that are spatially located both in the UK, through the material presence of Bush House, and abroad, through the diasporic communities constituting contemporary audiences. The service may have been set up to provide news and entertainment for the British diaspora abroad, but the transformation of the UK into a multi-ethnic society “at home,” alongside its commitment to, and the servicing of, no less than 32 countries abroad, demonstrates a new mission and a new balance of power. Different diasporic communities, such as multi-ethnic Londoners, and local and British Muslims in the north of England, demonstrate the dynamics and ambivalences of what is meant by “diaspora” today. For example, the BBC and the WS play an ambiguous role in the lives of UK Muslim communities with Pakistani connections, where consumers of the international news can feel that the BBC is complicit in the conflation of Muslims with terrorists. Engaging Diaspora Audiences demonstrated the diversity of audience reception in a climate of marginalisation, often bordering on moral panic, and showed how diasporic audiences often use Al-Jazeera or Pakistani and Urdu channels, which are seen to take up more sympathetic political positions. It seems, however, that more egalitarian conversations are becoming possible through the channels of the WS. The participation of local people in the BBC WS global project is seen, for example, as in the popular “Witness Seminars” that have both a current focus and one that is projected into the future, as in the case of the “2012 Generation” (that is, the young people who come of age in 2012, the year of the London Olympics). The Witness Seminars demonstrate the recuperation of past political and social events such as “Bangladesh in 1971” (Tuning In), “The Cold War seminar” (Tuning In) and “Diasporic Nationhood” (the cultural movements reiterated and recovered in the “Literary Lives” project (Gillespie, Baumann and Zinik). Indeed, the WS’s current focus on the “2012 Generation,” including an event in which 27 young people (each of whom speaks one of the WS languages) were invited to an open day at Bush House in 2009, vividly illustrates how things have changed. Whereas in 1948 (the last occasion when the Olympic Games were held in London), the world came to London, it is arguable that, in 2012, in contemporary multi-ethnic Britain, the world is already here (Webb). This enterprise has the advantage of giving voice to the present rather than filtering the present through the legacies of colonialism that remain a problem for the Witness Seminars more generally. The democratising possibilities of sport, as well as the restrictions of its globalising elements, are well represented by Tuning In (Woodward). Sport has, of course become more globalised, especially through the development of Internet and satellite technologies (Giulianotti) but it retains powerful local affiliations and identifications. At all levels and in diverse places, there are strong attachments to local and national teams that are constitutive of communities, including diasporic and multi-ethnic communities. Sport is both typical and distinctive of the BBC World Service; something that is part of a wider picture but also an area of experience with a life of its own. Our “Sport across Diasporas” project has thus explored some of the routes the World Service has travelled in its engagement with sport in order to provide some understanding of the legacy of empire and patriarchy, as well as engaging with the multiplicities of change in the reconstruction of Britishness. Here, it is important to recognise that what began as “BBC Sport” evolved into “World Service Sport.” Coverage of the world’s biggest sporting events was established through the 1930s to the 1960s in the development of the BBC WS. However, it is not only the global dimensions of sporting events that have been assumed; so too are national identifications. There is no question that the superiority of British/English sport is naturalised through its dominance of the BBC WS airways, but the possibilities of reinterpretation and re-accommodation have also been made possible. There has, indeed, been a changing place of sport in the BBC WS, which can only be understood with reference to wider changes in the relationship between broadcasting and sport, and demonstrates the powerful synchronies between social, political, technological, economic, and cultural factors, notably those that make up the media–sport–commerce nexus that drives so much of the trajectory of contemporary sport. Diasporic audiences shape the schedule as much as what is broadcast. There is no single voice of the BBC in sport. The BBC archive demonstrates a variety of narratives through the development and transformation of the World Service’s sports broadcasting. There are, however, silences: notably those involving women. Sport is still a patriarchal field. However, the imperial genealogies of sport are inextricably entwined with the social, political, and cultural changes taking place in the wider world. There is no detectable linear narrative but rather a series of tensions and contradictions that are reflected and reconfigured in the texts in which deliberations are made. In sport broadcasting, the relationship of the BBC WS with its listeners is, in many instances, genuinely dialogic: for example, through “Have Your Say” websites and internet forums, and some of the actors in these dialogic exchanges are the broadcasters themselves. The history of the BBC and the World Service is one which manifests a degree of autonomy and some spontaneity on the part of journalists and broadcasters. For example, in the case of the BBC WS African sports program, Fast Track (2009), many of the broadcasters interviewed report being able to cover material not technically within their brief; news journalists are able to engage with sporting events and sports journalists have covered social and political news (Woodward). Sometimes this is a matter of taking the initiative or simply of being in the right place at the right time, although this affords an agency to journalists which is increasingly unlikely in the twenty-first century. The Politics of Translation: Words and Music The World Service has played a key role as a cultural broker in the political arena through what could be construed as “educational broadcasting” via the wider terrain of the arts: for example, literature, drama, poetry, and music. Over the years, Bush House has been a home-from-home for poets: internationalists, translators from classical and modern languages, and bohemians; a constituency that, for all its cosmopolitanism, was predominantly white and male in the early days. For example, in the 1930s and 1940s, Louis MacNeice was commissioning editor and surrounded by a friendship network of salaried poets, such as W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, C. Day Lewis, and Stephen Spender, who wrote and performed their work for the WS. The foreign language departments of the BBC WS, meanwhile, hired émigrés and exiles from their countries’ educated elites to do similar work. The biannual, book-format journal Modern Poetry in Translation (MPT), which was founded in 1965 by Daniel Weissbort and Ted Hughes, included a dedication in Weissbort’s final issue (MPT 22, 2003) to “Poets at Bush House.” This volume amounts to a celebration of the BBC WS and its creative culture, which extended beyond the confines of broadcasting spaces. The reminiscences in “Poets at Bush House” suggest an institutional culture of informal connections and a fluidity of local exchanges that is resonant of the fluidity of the flows and networks of diaspora (Cheesman). Music, too, has distinctive characteristics that mark out this terrain on the broadcast schedule and in the culture of the BBC WS. Music is differentiated from language-centred genres, making it a particularly powerful medium of cross-cultural exchange. Music is portable and yet is marked by a cultural rootedness that may impede translation and interpretation. Music also carries ambiguities as a marker of status across borders, and it combines aesthetic intensity and diffuseness. The Migrating Music project demonstrated BBC WS mediation of music and identity flows (Toynbee). In the production and scheduling notes, issues of migration and diaspora are often addressed directly in the programming of music, while the movement of peoples is a leitmotif in all programs in which music is played and discussed. Music genres are mobile, diasporic, and can be constitutive of Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic” (Gilroy), which foregrounds the itinerary of West African music to the Caribbean via the Middle Passage, cross-fertilising with European traditions in the Americas to produce blues and other hybrid forms, and the journey of these forms to Europe. The Migrating Music project focused upon the role of the BBC WS as narrator of the Black Atlantic story and of South Asian cross-over music, from bhangra to filmi, which can be situated among the South Asian diaspora in east and south Africa as well as the Caribbean where they now interact with reggae, calypso, Rapso, and Popso. The transversal flows of music and lyrics encompasses the lived experience of the different diasporas that are accommodated in the BBC WS schedules: for example, they keep alive the connection between the Irish “at home” and in the diaspora through programs featuring traditional music, further demonstrating the interconnections between local and global attachments as well as points of disconnection and contradiction. Textual analysis—including discourse analysis of presenters’ speech, program trailers and dialogue and the BBC’s own construction of “world music”—has revealed that the BBC WS itself performs a constitutive role in keeping alive these traditions. Music, too, has a range of emotional affects which are manifest in the semiotic analyses that have been conducted of recordings and performances. Further, the creative personnel who are involved in music programming, including musicians, play their own role in this ongoing process of musical migration. Once again, the networks of people involved as practitioners become central to the processes and systems through which diasporic audiences are re-produced and engaged. Conclusion The BBC WS can claim to be a global and local cultural intermediary not only because the service was set up to engage with the British diaspora in an international context but because the service, today, is demonstrably a voice that is continually negotiating multi-ethnic audiences both in the UK and across the world. At best, the World Service is a dynamic facilitator of conversations within and across diasporas: ideas are relocated, translated, and travel in different directions. The “local” of a British broadcasting service, established to promote British values across the globe, has been transformed, both through its engagements with an increasingly diverse set of diasporic audiences and through the transformations in how diasporas themselves self-define and operate. On the BBC WS, demographic, social, and cultural changes mean that the global is now to be found in the local of the UK and any simplistic separation of local and global is no longer tenable. The educative role once adopted by the BBC, and then the World Service, nevertheless still persists in other contexts (“from Ambridge to Afghanistan”), and clearly the WS still treads a dangerous path between the paternalism and patriarchy of its colonial past and its responsiveness to change. In spite of competition from television, satellite, and Internet technologies which challenge the BBC’s former hegemony, the BBC World Service continues to be a dynamic space for (re)creating and (re)instating diasporic audiences: audiences, texts, and broadcasters intersect with social, economic, political, and cultural forces. The monologic “voice of empire” has been countered and translated into the language of diversity and while, at times, the relationship between continuity and change may be seen to exist in awkward tension, it is clear that the Corporation is adapting to the needs of its twenty-first century audience. ReferencesAnderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities, Reflections of the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Anderssen, Matilda. “Digital Diasporas.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/cross-research/digital-diasporas›. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Briggs, Asa. A History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Volume II: The Golden Age of Wireless. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Cheesman, Tom. “Poetries On and Off Air.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/cross-research/bush-house-cultures›. Chivallon, Christine. “Beyond Gilroy’s Black Atlantic: The Experience of the African Diaspora.” Diaspora 11.3 (2002): 359–82. Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Fast Track. BBC, 2009. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/sport/2009/03/000000_fast_track.shtml›. Gillespie, Marie, Alban Webb, and Gerd Baumann (eds.). “The BBC World Service 1932–2007: Broadcasting Britishness Abroad.” Special Issue. The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 28.4 (Oct. 2008). Gillespie, Marie, Gerd Baumann, and Zinovy Zinik. “Poets at Bush House.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/about›. Gilroy, Paul. Black Atlantic. MA: Harvard UP, 1993. Giulianotti, Richard. Sport: A Critical Sociology. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Goldblatt, David. “The Cricket Revolution.” 2009. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0036ww9›. Guha, Ramachandra. A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of an English Game. London: Picador, 2002. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990, 223–37. Hill, Andrew. “The BBC Empire Service: The Voice, the Discourse of the Master and Ventriloquism.” South Asian Diaspora 2.1 (2010): 25–38. Hollis, Robert, Norma Rinsler, and Daniel Weissbort. “Poets at Bush House: The BBC World Service.” Modern Poetry in Translation 22 (2003). Nandy, Ashis. The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1989. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Reith, John. “Opening of the Empire Service.” In “Empire Service Policy 1932-1933”, E4/6: 19 Dec. 1932. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/diasporas/research.htm›. Scannell, Paddy, and David Cardiff. A Social History of British Broadcasting, 1922-1938. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991. Skuse, Andrew. “Drama for Development.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/core-research/drama-for-development›. Sreberny, Annabelle. “The BBC World Service and the Greater Middle East: Comparisons, Contrasts, Conflicts.” Guest ed. Annabelle Sreberny, Marie Gillespie, Gerd Baumann. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 3.2 (2010). Toynbee, Jason. “Migrating Music.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/core-research/migrating-music›. Tuning In. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/diasporas/index.htm›. 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In this study we examine the development of the female poetic voice in the Puerto Rican context. Taking from the theoretical frameworks of Cultural Studies, Feminist Studies and New Historicism we re-read the political, cultural and literary history of Puerto Rico and its relation to the construction of the representations of Woman in texts written by women as well as those by men. In the first chapter we analyze the weight of gender and history in the elaboration of general discourse. We point out how all texts speak from a particular gendered perspective and respond to a historically determined moment which requires critical analysis that takes into consideration these contextual phenomena. From here we begin to re-examine the development of the female poetic creation from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1930s. We study the change of sovereignty and the political, social and cultural impact that this had on the literature of Puerto Rico. Mainly, we look into the gestation of a political-literary discourse created by Puerto Rican intellectuals, who were at the same time, responsible for the political and cultural events of the island. The second chapter explores the creation of a new political project for Puerto Rico which begins in 1940s and culminates with the Commonwealth. In addition, we review the political projects of the Commonwealth which required the active participation of literature since it was through literature that a cultural nationalism would be built, a nationalism that would compensate for the lack of an independent political state. Concluding this second chapter, we re-examine the decades of the sixties and seventies, viewing them as a period of change and of social and political struggle. We study the gradual separation of the literary and political spaces, which allowed a more transgressive discourse as well as a more authentic female voice. The third chapter is a critical analysis of the female poetic voice through the twentieth century. Among the selected poets are: Clara Lair, Haydee Ramirez de Arellano, Marigloria Palma, Angelamaria Davila, Olga Nolla, Manuel Ramos Otero and Mayra Santos Febres.

Caribbean poetry written in English has been attracting growing amounts of scholarly attention. The first substantial annotated bibliography of primary and secondary materials related to the topic, this reference chronicles the development of Anglophone Caribbean poetry from 1970 through 2001. Included are nearly 900 entries for anthologies, reference works, conference proceedings, critical studies, interviews, and recorded works. The volume also includes a chronology, an overview of the development and significance of Caribbean poetry in English, and extensive indexes. In 1971 the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies held a conference on West Indian literature at the University of the West Indies. This was the first assembly for the discussion of West Indian literature by West Indian people on West Indian soil. Since then, interest in Caribbean poetry written in English has grown dramatically. Caribbean poetry was influenced by the American Black Power movement during the 1970s, and women poets began to contribute their voices throughout the 1980s. Caribbean poets have, in turn, gained greater access to publishing outlets, resulting in a wider international readership and a corresponding increase in scholarly and critical studies. This book is the first substantial annotated bibliography of primary and secondary materials related to Caribbean poetry written in English. The volume begins with the rise of interest in Anglophone Caribbean poetry in the 1970s and continues through 2001. Included are entries for nearly 900 anthologies, reference works, conference proceedings, critical studies, interviews, and recordings. The entries are grouped in chapters devoted to particular types of works. In addition, the volume includes a chronology, a discussion of the history of Anglophone Caribbean poetry, and extensive indexes.

Abstract The consolidation of local traditions in the former colonies has depended on the capacity of poets to take on the challenges of selfrepresentation in a cultural climate relatively free of cultural cringe. The struggle to achieve that freedom is here illustrated in three case studies. The first shows African poets from the 1960s and ‘70s learning to use indigenous myths in a context informed by modernist writing. The second traces the growth of confidence in contemporary writing by women, chiefly from the Caribbean. The third examines the scope for creative overlap between a postcolonial predicament and a postmodern sensibility, as exemplified by the bilingual work of a poet from South Asia. The extended treatment given his work is meant to show how the literal and metaphorical activity of translation is at work in the spread of modernist and postmodernist practices to postcolonial poetry.

The literature of the Indo-Caribbean is replete with stories of migration and enslavement of bonded laborers brought from India. The West Indian literary tradition has for a long period overlooked the issue of real representation of East Indian female folk. The Indo-Caribbean female writers started contesting their space in the West Indies literature in the 1970s and 80s. This chapter argues that Ramabai Espinet's anthology Nuclear Seasons (1991) delineates the evolving identity of East Indian indentured female laborers from the state of complete ‘obfuscation' to ‘self-assertion'. The expressions of an anguished individual who faces cultural alienation and displacement owing to her hyphenated identity forms the major subject of the poems in the collection under study. The chapter analyses and establishes the ascendance of the East Indian indentured female laborers from the state of complete ‘annihilation' to ‘self-actualization' and final ‘recuperation' as has been portrayed by Espinet.

Abstract Grace Nichols’s sequence of poems I Is originates in her dream of an African girl swimming from Africa to the Caribbean with a garland of flowers around her waist, possibly in an attempt to purge the ocean of its burden-the misery and suffering her ancestors had experienced (Wisker 26). Other contemporary African American writers, such as Alice Walker, have explored both the Middle Passage and its mirror image, the quest for Africa-often, as Nichols’s garland might suggest, from a feminine angle and aesthetics. Women of African descent belonging to generations before Nichols’s and Walker’s dreamed of Africa as well, though their notions of the continent and its people differed considerably from contemporary ones.

In 1964, Nell and Dilys left New York on the Queen Mary, bound for London. The next stop was Burton Bradstock in West Dorset, home of poet Howard Griffin, where Nell began painting garden views. The women spent time in Paris and Lisbon before flying to the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, where Nell’s dealer Elinor Poindexter and her husband owned a banana plantation. Nell delighted in the native plants and birds. She taught the teenaged son of their cook to read and write and enjoyed visits by Arthur Cohen, her major collector, and poet Galway Kinnell. But despite the lush surroundings, the eleven months on St. Lucia were plagued by inconveniences, from quarreling workmen to scorpions and torrential rains. Nell’s April 1966 Poindexter Gallery show, which included many works completed in St. Lucia, was well reviewed. Then came a great shock: in late May, Dilys suddenly moved out.