关键词：
Caribbean literature
Literature
Women's studies
摘要：
Though many scholars have already remarked upon the Caribbean as a site of cultural and culinary convergence, this study specifically addresses the role of women, desire, and food within literature of the region. Existing research on these topics tends to focus on the phenomenology of events within Caribbean history. Scholars have noted the function of food in nation-building, the impact of plantation economics across the islands, and the symbolic power of edible commodities in the region, but few employ a gendered lens to examine the intersections of these areas. My research illustrates how postcolonial female subjects are inextricable from edible commodities cultivated in the Caribbean and how women writers such as Edwidge Danticat, Shani Mootoo, and Pauline Melville have made use of this property in contemporary literature as a means of reclaiming history and shaping identity. This project will analyze novels and short stories with feminist postcolonial theory and historiographic research as a framework. My dissertation is informed by notions of “eating the Other” as articulated by bell hooks as well as Valérie Loichot's The Tropics Bite Back: Culinary Coups in Caribbean Literature. Additionally, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the nineteenth Century by Kyla Wazana Tompkins shapes my understanding of gender and edibility. I situate my research within the larger field of critical eating studies as defined by Tompkins. The function of critical eating studies is to show the politicized nature of eating as well as the overlap between the fetishization of food objects, racial minorities, and women. My dissertation project is unique in its focus on the specific contributions of living Caribbean women authors. While my work draws from history and cultural studies, it remains rooted in literary scholarship. I understand literature as the space where lost narratives can be excavated, resurfaced, and re-presented to ultimately enrich our understanding of writing and h
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