Caribbean American Immigrant Women Sparknotes

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Bearing double level of oppression, women search for a way out, a space of freedom for self-expression, this is what Riley intended to translate those hardships and transmit voices of dissent which were gone unheard. Riley wants to focus on Caribbean immigrant women’s preoccupation with the denial of their presence usually surrounded by racial prejudices and cultural misunderstandings. This situation adds to the tension of the migratory experience and serves in heightening the degree of women’s suffering from alienation and serves in fragmenting their view they form upon their identity as an immigrant and as a female subject. All those ideas are translated in the protagonist’s journey towards the former colonizing country, Hyacinth …show more content…

This category suffers persistence in binarism that puts them in the status of a subaltern, a silent subject hardly mentioned or regarded as a part of society or history. This state of subalternity that Caribbean immigrant women represent reflects also their failure to be represented or integrated in the Western societies due to the legacies of slavery and colonial image that remained as a blueprint that affects their future as postcolonial subjects. Clifford suggests that “diasporic women are caught between patriarchies, ambiguous pasts and futures. They connect and disconnect, forget and remember in complex strategic ways. The lived experience of diaspora women, thus, involve painful difficulty in mediating discrepant worlds” (85). What is retained from Clifford’s quotation is that Caribbean immigrant women are still shackled in a series of power discourse concerning intellectual representation and power dynamics based on the triple tropes of racial, patriarchal, and social hierarchy …show more content…

Those two oppressions are thus irrevocably intertwined; the more he is made inferior and the more he needs to assert his masculinity by which I mean his superiority over the Black woman.

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