Cambridge Scholars Publishing Queer Rebellion in the Novels of Michelle Cliff: Intersectionality and Sexual Modernity

This book explores Jamaican-American author Michelle Cliff’s (1946–2016) literary rebellion against the colonial, gendered and racist norms of Western Modernity. It studies the sexualized circuits of the Atlantic world, drawing on the fields of literary criticism, feminist theories, queer studies and Caribbean studies. In order to do this, the book develops the theoretical paradigm of intersectionality. It also addresses the disturbing questions concerning the sexual politics of transatlantic modernity as represented in Cliff’s novels. Cliff’s rebellious poetics envisions the colonial Caribbean past in new ways. Her novels tell stories about Caribbean queer characters setting the queer as a site of postcolonial agency and as a perspective out of which colonial history can be re-written. This book considers myths, rites, and cultural memory as sites of healing in the midst of colonial bodily politics. Transnational histories, identity and ethics emerge as intertwined in Cliff’s feminist novels. About the Author Kaisa Ilmonen is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies (TIAS) at the University of Turku, Finland, where she works in the Department of Comparative Literature. Ilmonen received her doctorate in 2012, with a thesis exploring queering and intersectionality in Michelle Cliff’s novels. She has published widely on Caribbean literature, postcolonial studies, queer issues in postcolonial literature, and intersectionality, and is also one of the founding members of the Finnish Society for Queer Studies.