Affordable Access

Images of the sea in three Carribean women's texts : Jamaica Kincaid’s <i>At the Bottom of the River</i>, Grace Nichols’s <i>I Have Crossed an Ocean</i> and Olive Senior’s <i>Hurricane Watch</i>

Authors
  • Montoriol, Salomé
Publication Date
Jun 15, 2023
Source
HAL-Descartes
Keywords
Language
English
License
Unknown
External links

Abstract

This dissertation draws on Derek Walcott's poem "The Sea is History" to explore oceanic imageries through Caribbean literature, and more specifically through a female corpus that includes a collection of short stories by Jamaica Kincaid, <i>At the Bottom of the River</i> (1983), and two poetry collections, Grace Nichols’s <i>I Have Crossed an Ocean</i> (2010) and <i>Hurricane Watch</i> (2022) by Olive Senior. In the wake of Oceanic Studies and the emergence of the Blue Humanities, this paper analyzes the Atlantic Ocean as a palimpsest saturated by the memories of colonization and slavery. In keeping with Édouard Glissant’s notion of Relation and Paul Gilroy’s <i>Black Atlantic</i>, the image of the sea in the Caribbean context is caught between the idea of a vault and that of a space of creation. This thesis interrogates both poetic and pictorial representations of the sea by placing the literary corpus in dialogue with three visual works: Howardena Pindell's painting <i>Autobiography: Water/Ancestors/Middle Passage/Family Ghosts</i> (1988), Isaac Julien's film installation <i>Paradise Omeros</i> (2002) and Ellen Gallagher's watercolor series <i>Watery Ecstatic</i> (2004-2020).

Report this publication

Statistics

Seen <100 times