Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference

Selwyn R. Cudjoe is professor and chair of Africana studies at Wellesley College. His books include V. S. Naipaul: A Materialist Reading, published by the University of Massachusetts Press.

"Selwyn Cudjoe has made an important contribution to the field of Caribbean studies in editing Caribbean Women Writers. In 1988 he organized a conference as Wellesley College that brought together fifty women authors and critics, mainly Anglophone, to discuss their contemporary literature. The resultant volume provides a rich source for understanding why the authors write and how the critics interpret their works with respect to the Caribbean cultural setting."—World Literature Today

"This landmark volume analyzes Caribbean feminist traditions, giving voice to writers' own statements. . . . [These statements are] particularly useful, . . . remarkable examples of theorizing the politics of identities, language uses, and colonial education systems through autobiography and the personal voice."—Choice

"Anthologies are by nature ambitious endeavors. To represent a variety of styles, points of view, and subject matter in one volume is not an easy task--particularly when the subject has only recently gained popularity and still lacks a full critical literature. Caribbean Women Writers triumphs over those odds, offering a lively dialogue between critics and authors that works to formulate an emerging literary tradition. Cudjoe's presentation emphasizes the active and cooperative elements of such a tradition, one shaped by what Laure Niesen de Abruna terms 'alienation within alienation.' He juxtaposes essays or review of a writer's work with the author's own explanation of the forces that drive her to write."—San Francisco Review of Books