TITLE:

GENDER AND POST- THEORIES AS COUNTER-CULTURAL DISCOURSE IN BLACK CANADIAN WOMEN’S WRITING

Author:

Pedro Carmona Rodríguez

Institution:

Universidad de La Laguna

E-mail:

pmcarmo@ull.es   

The literary production of black Canadian women writers definitely caught the critics’ eye in the 1990s, in the aftermath of the multicultural deluge. After the turn of the century, furthermore, their stance in the literary and social scene has been reinvigorated, whereas their combative stance has been strongly preserved. Through their role as poets, novelists, playwrights and/or social activists, most of them construe their gendered subjects as a cultural counter-discourse. The fluid definition with which their diasporic baggage endows them also gives them a transient gaze, ideal for the adoption of post-structuralist and postmodernist ways of reading and writing.

This paper stems from the tension arising from, on the one hand, the reclamation of a different identity, and on the other, from the negation of any identity as constructed traditionally. The juxtaposition of these claims of identity and difference and a parallel alliance with the refusal of stereotypical identities and standpoints turn their texts per se into counter-narratives of patriarchy and colonialism, artefacts that reject generic boundaries, and, likewise, the allocated slots provided by the multicultural models of society and culture.