Castro Borrego, Silvia and Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz, eds.: Cultural Migrations and
Gendered Subjects: Colonial and Postcolonial Representations of the Female Body.
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2011. (ISBN 978-1-4438-2646-4;
160 pages).


The present volume explores through cultural and literary representations the
contributions of women to the construction of knowledge in an ever changing, global world
as migrant subjects. The essays contained in this book will also focus on the female body as a
site of physical violence and abuse, fighting prevalent stereotypes about women’s
representations and identities. This collection intends to enter a forum of discussion in which
the colonial past serves as a point of reference for the analysis of contemporary issues.
Women’s strategies for building possible identities are seen to be based on their own
experiences, seeking the ways in which the public marking and marketing of the female body
within the western male imaginary contributes to the making of women’s social and personal
identities.
The different articles contained in this volume will examine issues of gender and
boundaries, the realities of women as colonial and postcolonial subjects, and darker realities
such as alienation and discrimination as a result of migration, racism, and colonization
analysed through a variety of critical perspectives. The gendered, raced, classed dimensions
and mixed heritages not only of white women but also of women of the African Diaspora are
important issues for the construction of knowledge and identity in our present multicultural
societies, and can potentially change the ways we conceptualize, situate and engage the
humanities in our scholarly work and in our social and cultural policies. These women and
their presumed sexuality and their capacity to produce hybrid subjects, as well as their
supposed irrationality make them a singularly disruptive figure in our contemporary world;
this interpretation has also its roots in the treatment of women in colonial times, especially
when they were out of the margins of respectable society.


TABLE OF CONTENTS


Preface (David Glover)
Introduction: Repossesssing Our Bodies and Ourselves (Silvia Pilar Castro Borrego and
Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz)
Toni Morrison’s Love: The Celestial Whore and Other Female “Outlaws” (Justine Tally)
Women’s Identity and Migration: Stead’s Articles in the Pall Mall Gazette on Prostitution
and White Slavery (Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz)
Black Bodies in History: Bernardine Evaristo’s Fiction (Pilar Cuder Domínguez)
Gender, Migration and Identity: Agnès Agboton’s Canciones del Poblado y del Exilio (Mar
Gallego Durán)
69
Migrations of the Self: The Search for Identity and Wholeness in Bebe Moore Campbell’s
Novel What You Owe Me (Silvia Pilar Castro Borrego)
About Face, or, What Is This “Back” in B(l)ack Popular Culture?: From Venus Hottentot to
Video Hottie
(Mae G. Henderson)

 

 

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