Daughters of Caliban: Caribbean Women in the Twentieth Century (review)

Daughters of Caliban: Caribbean Women in the Twentieth Century, by Consuelo Lopez Springfield. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997. 316 pp.

Shakespeare's monstrous savage in The Tempest has long represented an alternative tradition of resistance to the European colonizers and North American imperialists, particularly, given the geographical location of the play, in the Caribbean and Latin America. But his symbolic appropriation also reflects an equally long tradition of silence and erasure of any female counterpart to accompany a largely male-dominated politics of defiance and decolonization. With a few exceptions like Sylvia Wynter and Michelle Cliff, not much has been said about either Sycorax, Caliban's equally demonized mother, or his repressed mate.

The collection of essays Daughters of Caliban: Caribbean Women in the Twentieth Century, edited by Consuelo Lopez Springfield, corrects this historical omission by appropriating Caliban's legacy in order to articulate Caribbean women's histories. As Springfield sums up in her introduction, this "interdisciplinary book by feminist scholars in anthropology, sociology, health, law, literature, and culture studies focuses on issues of direct importance to women: interregional immigrant female labor, the interplay of race and gender in the construction of national cultures, the impact of developmental policies and colonialist legal practices on women's lives, and women's creative roles in providing continuity in exile communities" (xi). The result is a very successful series of essays, thirteen in all, revealing the richness and complexity of women's histories in the Caribbean from a variety of perspectives that work well together.

The book is organized into five parts that indicate some of the major issues of interest to feminists: Caribbean Women and Women's Studies; Women and Work; Women and Health; Women, Law, and Political Change; and Women and Popular Culture. The interdisciplinary range is further enriched by a geographical scope encompassing different islands and cultures of the Caribbean and not just one dominant linguistic area. In fact, part 1 elaborates this diversity as Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert argues against a Caribbean feminism that might simulate the deceptive homogeneity of the Caribbean rather than the "multifaceted" and competing realities of women's lives (4). But while her advocacy of local and specific scholarship is worth pursuing seriously, as Cynthia Mesh's subsequent essay on the Creole movement in Guadeloupe demonstrates, her critique of "European American feminist thought" and (Western) theories runs the same risk of homogenizing equally complex and contested fields. The essays that follow t his section live up to the initial promise, often engaging in a productive conversation among themselves. Thus, while Mesh's emphasis on an indigenous language consciousness as the foundation for a social, political, and economic renaissance in the French departments might raise questions, essays in part 2 reinsert the crucial impact of international labor in a global capitalist system on Caribbean social dynamics. The external-internal, Western theory-local materiality split is a difficult binary to maintain in the face of the literal transnational movement by Caribbean women 191into so-called Western countries (reflected in the academic backgrounds and current locations of most of the book's contributors, one might add).

The "cultural flows across the Americas," as Carla Freeman refers to it in her fascinating essay on higglering in the contemporary Barbadian context (69), challenge the traditional dualistic models of the First and Third Worlds without negating the unequal structures that informed such models. Luisa Hernandez Angueira's "Across the Mona Strait" similarly dispels myths of a pan-Caribbean solidarity by exposing the racism and economic discrimination faced by underclass Dominicans who migrate to Puerto Rico in search of better living conditions. And while Karen McCarthy Brown's essay on Vodoun rightly gives this religion the respectability it deserves, any romanticization of indigenous beliefs is checked by Elisa Sobo's balanced critique of local taboos and gender relations in rural Jamaica and by Caroline Allen's discussion of the very serious health concerns caused by irresponsible practices.

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