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Grotesque Touch

Women, Violence, and Contemporary Circum-Caribbean Narratives

Amy King

Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Imprint: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 09/2021
Pages: 248
Subject: Literary Criticism, Social Science
Print ISBN: 9781469664644
eBook ISBN: 9781469664651

DESCRIPTION

In this book, Amy K. King examines how violence between women in contemporary Caribbean and American texts is rooted in plantation slavery. Analyzing films, television shows, novels, short stories, poems, book covers, and paintings, King shows how contemporary media reuse salacious and stereotypical depictions of relationships between women living within the plantation system to confront its legacy in the present. The vestiges of these relationships--enslavers and enslaved women, employers and domestic servants, lovers and rivals--negate characters' efforts to imagine non-abusive approaches to power and agency. King's work goes beyond any other study to date to examine the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, ability, and nationality in U.S. and Caribbean depictions of violence between women in the wake of slavery.