Grace Nichols

This first full-length study of Grace Nichols’s work argues that, rather than exploring the tension between its ‘Caribbeaness’ and ‘Britishness’,it is more productively read in terms of a series of border crossings. Nichols’s major female protagonists are seen as epic journeyers travelling across different cultural and psychic landscapes. It shows how her poetry explores the boundaries of race, class and gender as part of the lived experience of being a black woman in Britain and the study focuses on the specifics of black British women’s writing, different feminist reading strategies, rewriting history and revisioning myth in Nichols’s poetry and the nature of diaspora, cultural hybridity and the complex meaning of ‘home’ for the migrant writer. AUTHOR: Sarah Lawson Welsh is Senior Lecturer in English at York St. John University. CONTENTS Acknowledgements Biographical Outline Abbreviations and References 1. Charting the Terrain 2. Feminist Readings of Grace Nichols 3. Epic Journeying I: ‘i is a long memoried woman’ 4. Epic Journeying II: ‘sunris’ 5. ‘A Writer across Two Worlds’ 6. Conclusion: Border Crossings and Hybrid Futures Notes Select Bibliography Index