I RATHER DEAD:
A Spivakian Reading of Indo-Caribbean Women's Narratives
by Dorota Goluch

Within the already colonized and marginalized Indo-Caribbean communities, Indo-Caribbean women can be considered a discriminated group, and their (self-)representation may be analyzed as subaltern speech. This book discusses fiction and other stories of Indo-Caribbean women, concentrating on their attempts to rewrite ‘regulative psychobiographies’, as the postcolonial feminist critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls traditional narratives dominating women's lives. Attempting to bear witness to gender, race, and class differences, this analysis interrogates how the attempted self-expression is mediated, retrieved and read by others. It also demonstrates that, depending on the position and power of the parties involved in the processes of representation, intervention into oppressive scripts can assume very different forms. The author believes that recognition of all the different forms of speaking—through words, silences, languages, actions, bodies, etc.—can help to make the intervention happen and the subaltern voice heard. For any scholar researching on the feminist, postmodern or postcolonial aspects of Caribbean women’s writings this analysis by Dorota Goluch will act as an indispensible companion.

Dorota Goluch studied English literature and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Kent in England, Jagiellonian University in Poland and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet in Munich. She is currently researching on Polish translations and the reception of Anglophone postcolonial fiction at the University College London where she is a teaching affiliate. Her research interests include Caribbean women's writing, postcolonial translation and the questions of East European postcoloniality.

‘A sympathetic voice, Goluch’s insightful analysis of the literary and feminist readings on Indo-Caribbean women, fulfils Spivak’s intent of not only privileging this subaltern voice, but looking further to retrieval of their consciousness.’

Patricia Mohammed
Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies,
University of the West Indies

‘In utilizing a Spivakian lens through which to interpret Indo-Caribbean women’s narratives, Dorota Goluch shows great respect for historical and cultural context within which literature evolves. Simultaneously, the study plumbs the minds of the characters as they struggle to psychologically liberate themselves from scripts that have been handed to them. It is a sensitive and thorough work that adds to knowledge about the Caribbean and, more generally, the complexity of understanding and affirming self in a space of domination.’

Prof. Rosanne Kanhai
Professor & Director of Women’s Studies,
Western Washington University

‘Goluch puts to work Spivak’s protocols of reading while attending closely to a critically neglected body of writing, Indo-Caribbean fiction by women.’

Donna Landry
Professor of English and American Literature,
University of Kent