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Mills College French Professor Mehta Explores Caribbean Women's Voices
Oakland, CA–September 16, 2009. Mills College French Professor Brinda J. Mehta has published her fourth book, Notions of Identity, Diaspora and Gender in Caribbean Women’s Writing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2009) focusing on the writings of women from Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Haiti. The women’s perspectives include memories of slavery and indenture marked by violence, trauma, and resistance, and explore their individual and collective Caribbean identities. Questions raised in Mehta’s study include: What healing strategies did the women use to come to terms with their fractured histories/identities? When women’s voices are typically either muted or marginalized in male-centered Caribbean discourses, how do women feminize notions of diaspora? With its painful history of African slavery and East Indian indenture, how is the female body represented in Caribbean feminist thought? “My study focuses on these women writers because they add a very important gendered perspective on questions of race, identity, transnationalism, sexuality, spirituality, diaspora, and history to existing discourses on Caribbean intellectual thought,” said Mehta, who specializes in the French Caribbean. “Caribbean women have never played a secondary role in intellectual, historical, and cultural production despite the peripheral position they have occupied in master narratives,” she said. ”The women position themselves as vibrant cultural agents as they engender history and literature through an anti-patriarchal, anti-colonial and anti-essentialist lens.” Mehta’s previous books include Rituals of Memory in Contemporary Arab Women’s Writing (Syracuse University Press, 2007); Diasporic (Dis)locations: Indo-Caribbean Women Writers Negotiate the Kala Pani (University Press of the West Indies, 2004—Winner of the Frantz Fanon Prize (2007); Corps infirme, corps infâme: la femme dans le roman balzacien (Summa Publications, 1992). She is currently working on her fifth book, Creative Resistance: The Dissident Voices of Arab Women. Nestled in the foothills of Oakland, California, Mills College is a nationally renowned, independent liberal arts college offering a dynamic progressive education that fosters leadership, social responsibility, and creativity to approximately 950 undergraduate women and 500 graduate women and men. Since 2000, applications to Mills College have more than doubled. The College is named one of the top colleges in the West by U.S. News & World Report, and ranks as one of the Best 371 Colleges by the Princeton Review. Forbes.com ranked Mills 55th among America's best colleges and named it a "Top Ten: Best of the All-Women's Colleges." Visit us at www.mills.edu.PRESS CONTACT: |
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