EXPLORING FEMININE SUBJECTIVITY IN CARIBBEAN HISTORY: A NEW HISTORICIST PERSPECTIVE IN EDWIDGE DANTICAT’S THE FARMING OF BONES

Methuselah Jeremiah, Aule, Moses

Abstract


Set within the context of Caribbean literature, this paper deploys New
Historicism to posit in its argument that history as used in
EdwidgeDanticat’sThe Farming of Bones exposes the socio-political dilemma
hindering the Caribbean people from realising a seamless sense of Caribbean-ness.
To this end, the study unravels the various layers of Caribbean history to
challenge forces that have made the Caribbean people to suffered setbacks, first, in
the ways their leaders not only hijacked their nations in terms of bad leadership
but by doing so, have set precedence that have continued to hinder the Caribbean
people from realising the essence of selfhood. Second, the paper exposes the
relational tensions that have created divisions among the Caribbean people. The
essence of these is to sustain the argument that Caribbean women writers do not
only use their texts as a platform for decrying gender imbalances within
patriarchal setting or deploy history as a form of writing back to the dominating
centre but that by engaging with history, they too write to the Caribbean nations
to interrogate the state of nation-state and question the notion of selfhood in the
context of the Caribbean. Thus, the paper reveals the relationship between
authorial intentions and text-meaning by loosening various historical knots that
provide context for interrogating the sense of nationhood in the Caribbean.

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