Caribbean Women Writing From Abroad

Taking Flight: Caribbean Women Writing from Abroad closely examines Caribbean

women's prose fiction published from 1959 to 2011. This project illustrates the power of the

diasporic voice. This study explores how flight serves as a recurring response to exile in

Caribbean women's writing by transnational authors as diverse as Edwidge Danticat, Pauline

Melville and Michelle Cliff. In the works under study, flight serves as a vehicle for coming to

terms with conflictions of place and identity. While analyzing the transformative power of flight

in novels such as Breath, Eyes, Memory and Abeng, I read women in various states of exile.

Drawing distinctions between literal and figurative, or mental, flight, this project proffers

figurative flight as a form of resuscitation and healing for the protagonists. Moving beyond

traditional understandings of flight, Taking Flight asserts the centrality of figurative flight to the

transformative process for authors as well as the protagonists they depict. Rather than operating

in binary opposition, symbolic flight is facilitated by the most literal of flights, migration.