Abstract
AbstractKaren Lord’s speculative folktale Redemption in Indigo (2010) engages the other-wordly or un-worldly to explore Caribbean social justice issues such as race, gender, and class inequality. Demonstrating her trickster powers, Lord merges folk gods and hero(ines) from different African traditions, for example Akan, Ashanti, Xhosa, and Karamba, with those found in Caribbean cultures. This syncretic textual strategy not only emphasizes the subversive, liminal qualities of both Ananse, the African-Caribbean folk figure, and Anansesem in challenging colonial metanarratives of time and space that have erased, denigrated, or falsely represented the African-Caribbean woman but also critiques masculinist versions of Ananse and traditionally male-dominated Anansesem. By contrast, Lord’s antipatriarchal, anticolonial account foregrounds Ananse’s feminine qualities and empowered female figures: the nonbinary storyteller, the heroine Paama, and the goddess Atabey. In doing so, Lord offers a new futuristic, feminocentric Ananse story whose weblike concentric patterns interweave the African past with the Caribbean present, the ancestral homeland with the diaspora.
Publisher
Springer International Publishing
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