Making Homes in the West/Indies: Constructions of Subjectivity in the Writings of Michelle Cliff and Jamaica Kincaid

This study focuses on the ways in which two of the most prominent Caribbean women writers residing in the United States, Michelle Cliff and Jamaica Kincaid, have made themselves at home within Caribbean poetics, even as their migration to the United States affords them participation and acceptance within its literary space. Availing themselves of the strategies of writing available in both traditions, Cliff and Kincaid are using their writings to theorize subjectivity within migatory and cross-cultural contexts. This book demonstrates that the patterns of convergent, yet multiply located subjectivity that both writers arrive at differ in scope and influence, contoured as they are by the peculiar intersections of race, class, and sexuality. Making Homes in the West/Indies is the first full-length study to mount a comparative analysis of Michelle Cliff’s and Jamaica Kidd’s canon.