Refusing ‘Slave Man's Revenge’: Reading the Politics of the Resisting Body in Zee Edgell's Beka Lamb and Brenda Flanagan's You Alone Are Dancing
In this article I focus on the black woman's body and its use as a political and cultural signifier and as a site where the politics of gender power is enacted. I argue that two first novels of two contemporary Caribbean women writers, Zee Edgell and Brenda Flanagan, intervene in a history of fictional representation which uses the figure of the ‘native’ woman to signify territorial, economic and sexual conquest and exploitation. The black woman, in early twentieth‐century Caribbean anti‐colonial fiction, silently concedes to her aggressor, whose actions ultimately end in her destruction. The novels of these writers revise the themes and forms of representation that characterise these earlier, predominantly male‐authored texts: in its focus on resistance to both colonial and patriarchal dominance, their work presents an alternative to either victimhood or to the suggestion that, for the poor, working‐class black woman, her body is her only capital.