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4 Rosa Guy, Haiti, and the Hemispheric Woman To frame the Black feminist intervention of Rosa Guy’s The Sun, the Sea, a Touch of the Wind (1995), I want to discuss a contemporaneous novel Sea, a Touch of the Wind (1995), I want to discuss a contemporaneous novel Sea, a Touch of the Wind that shares with Guy’s the theme of African American female rejuvenation and empowerment through Caribbean romance—Terry McMillan’s bestseller and pop culture phenomenon, How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1996). Because McMillan is one of the most widely known authors who defines Black feminism today, it is worthwhile to consider how her work takes up Carole Boyce Davies’ salient questions: “How do United States Black women/women of color, often the most dispossessed on the ladder of social and economic resources, pursue their own liberation? Is it through alliance with oppression or in resistance?” As I will argue, the influential yet problematic version of Black women’s liberation popularized by McMillan’s novel—with its reliance on the interlocking ideologies of heteronormativity and U.S. exceptionalism —is countered by Guy’s examination in The Sun, the Sea, a Touch of the Wind of Black internationalism’s meanings for African American women in the late twentieth century. In McMillan’s Stella, the eponymous heroine is a successful but weary African American financial consultant who finds rejuvenation through dating a winsome younger man from Jamaica, Winston, whom she meets while vacationing on the island. After overcoming myriad obstacles, Stella and Winston reunite in the United States with the promise of marriage. In the words of Oprah Winfrey, this was “a story based on real life that gave millions of lonely women hope” as they avidly consumed McMillan’s “intimate details of her own steamy romance with a man 23 years younger” in Jamaica. The novel’s “real life” basis and unfolding in the form of McMillan’s marriage to Jonathan Plummer fueled the Stella phenomenon, including the movie based on the novel starring Angela Bassett and Taye Diggs. However, Stella’s compelling narrative of romance relies upon and promulgates U.S. exceptionalism. What matters is not only that Stella and Winston marry but that they marry in the United States, figured as the land of opportunity through blissful inattention not only to the exploitative tourist industry that has brought the happy couple together, but to the role of the United States in engineering the economic, political, and social crises (the crippling debt, trade deficit, poverty, widening income gap, and deteriorating social services) that have left Jamaica overreliant on tourism for its gross national product. That Stella briefly but directly addresses slavery and domestic racism only foregrounds its blindness to U.S. imperialism and raises the question of why this lacuna seems so necessary within the generic imperatives of popular romance fiction—a topic I return to in the conclusion. Rosa Guy’s The Sun, the Sea, a Touch of the Wind, published just one year before Stella, starts from the opposing premise that demystifying and challenging U.S.imperialismisessentialtoBlackfeministnarrativesofempowerment—and that Black feminism redefines anti-imperialist and anticolonial struggles for sovereignty. In Guy’s novel, the ongoing legacy of Haiti’s “colonial, imperial slave past” is embedded not only in the country’s landscape, which is “devastated by the United States government’s futile attempt to produce substitute rubber for World War II,” but also, and just as importantly, in the psyche of its African American female protagonist, Jonnie Dash. Jonnie travels to Haiti in the 1970s thinking that rekindling romance with an old lover there will heal her psychic wounds. However, Jonnie Dash’s very name (and she is frequently called by her full name) alludes to the paradoxical nature of free movement for African Americans, especially women, a result of the ways that “state violence directed at peoples of color [in the United States] not only defines U.S. democracy but also provides an insidious blueprint for U.S. imperial designs.” Although Jonnie is regularly described as “dashing around,” her agency is undermined by her inability to move on, physically or psychologically, from the violence to which she has been subjected as an African American woman and the increasingly clear international dimensions of that violence. While she has purposively traveled from the United States to Haiti and from Port-au-Prince to the idyllic mountain village of Fermath, unresolved pain and anger from her past lead to a blackout during which she returns...

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