Caribbean Spaces

Reviewed by: Caribbean Spaces: Escapes from Twilight Zones by Carole Boyce Davies Shamara Wyllie Alhassan (bio) Davies, Carole Boyce. Caribbean Spaces: Escapes from Twilight Zones. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2013. In Caribbean Spaces: Escapes from Twilight Zones, Carole Boyce Davies engages critical geography, autobiography, and the radical imaginary to analyze the ways women take, make, and shape Caribbean cultural cartographies. Davies goes beyond middle passage theorizations of diaspora to discuss the ways migration, transnationalism, home, and twilight zones create new cultural spaces and portable self-making practices. These concepts of transnational identity formation build on Davies previous books Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994) and Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (2008) by adding to her ideas of migratory subjectivity, radical Black diasporic subject formation, and the politics of location. The overarching meditations of the book are space, accessibility, and the politics of the personal. From the beginning of her book, Davies defines space as “infinite and ever expanding” and “not only location itself but how social, political, and cultural life informs and reshapes geography . . . Thus, we can read space as politicized, gendered, racialized, and therefore also classed” (6). This definition of space becomes the basis for Davies exploration of Caribbean space and twilight zones. Davies defines twilight zones as “spaces of transformation from one condition to another, one location to another, one reality to another, and sometimes newly created emotional, physical, and conceptual space that then becomes another identified location. Twilight zones can therefore be scary spaces of loss, but also of gain” (11–12). By conceptualizing space in both of these ways, Davies situates her analysis in the tension between infinite transformation and structures of oppression, of travel and stasis, of the Underground Railroad and the fault lines of popular culture. Davies’ work on space is in conversation with the critical theorizations of Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (2006). The tensions Davies articulates in her book are crystalized by her notion of escape routes, which she defines as “movements of freedom not only toward North, but also from the North to the South, therefore also from the Caribbean to the United States, but also its reverse, from the United States to the Caribbean” (13). By decentering the historic imperial relationship between the global north and the global south, Davies invites readers to think about power paradigms through a meditation on space and the transnational world making strategies of Caribbean women. One of the gifts of Davies’ book is her use of different post-1960s biographies of Caribbean migrants to explore the ways these women psychically and materially create multiple homes and spaces of subversion and transgression. Davies argues that post-independence development of the Caribbean nation-state allowed people to [End Page 940] shift imaginations of distant historical homelands of Africa or India and develop a “logic of identity in location” that did not require a return or re-mapping of the middle passage or the route of indentured servitude. I wonder about those trans-generational groups of people in the Caribbean who purposefully undermine the post-independent Caribbean nation, like some Rastafari communities, that identify as African and are returning to continental Africa as their original home. How do the narratives of these communities transform Caribbean subjectivities? Davies alludes to this possibility when she mentions the declaration of the African Diaspora as the Sixth region of the African Union, the call of some African nations for the African Diaspora to return, and her mediation on the “(im) possibility of return” (156). Davies engages the field of African Diaspora Studies in three ways. Firstly, she leverages Black feminist methodologies, outlined by Patricia Hill Collins, through her use of the personal narrative “I” in addition to her own experiences as the basis for her theorizations. (For more on Black feminist methods, see Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment 2000). By leveraging her personal narrative, she is able to take the reader on a journey through her life as a professor, a student, a Trinidadian women participating in the Black power movement at an Historically Black

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Biography · Diaspora · Epistemology · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Subjectivity · The Imaginary · Transnationalism · Twilight · Anthropology · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Gender Studies · History · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Philosophy