This review essay on Laurie R. Lambert’s Comrade Sister: Caribbean Feminist Revisions of the Revolution (2020) considers the narrative and rhetorical strategies that Black women political figures use in their memoirs to represent US imperial presence and violence in the aftermath of the Grenada Revolution. As it highlights Lambert’s attention to Joan Purcell’s truncated temporal framing of the Grenada Revolution, the essay offers a close reading of Phyllis Coard’s memoir to elaborate the significance of temporality in literary representations of the revolution and to question how the memoir as a genre both elaborates and dulls trauma. Rather than emphasize and celebrate the exceptional quality of Black women political figures and their careers, the essay points to a close reading practice that more seriously considers Black womanhood and empire.
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Book Review|
November 01 2022
The Minister of Mercy Is a Homegirl
BOOK DISCUSSION:Lambert, Laurie R.,
Comrade Sister: Caribbean Feminist Revisions of the Grenada Revolution
; Charlottesville
: University of Virginia Press
, 2020
; 242
pages; ISBN 978-0813944265 (softcover)
Randi Gill-Sadler
Randi Gill-Sadler is assistant professor of English and Africana studies at Davidson College. She specializes in twentieth-century African American and Afro-Caribbean women’s literature, US cultures of imperialism, and Black feminist literary criticism. Her work examines how late-twentieth-century Black women writers both anticipate and critique African Americans’ participation in US imperial exploits and the consequences for Black diasporic relationality.
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Small Axe (2022) 26 (3 (69)): 144–152.
Citation
Randi Gill-Sadler; The Minister of Mercy Is a Homegirl. Small Axe 1 November 2022; 26 (3 (69)): 144–152. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-10211751
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