When I was in college, I took a class on French Caribbean literature. For a long time, then, that’s what Caribbean literature was to me: French. I’m a lot older now, though, and a long chat with Professor Tanya Shields at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill has set me further straight. Her class, “Rahtid Rebel Women: An Intro to Caribbean Women,” covers everything from literature to cooking and was named as one of Elle Magazine’s “63 College Classes That Give Us Hope for the Next Generation.” We talked about intersectionality, women’s studies, and so much more.
The Writer: Let’s start at the beginning. How do we define Caribbean literature?
I think this definitional question is one that haunts the field, and I would say it haunts the field of Caribbean studies, not even just Caribbean literature, because we’re always looking at issues of place and who has the right to speak, who gets to speak when. So if we think of most of the Caribbean, these islands were colonized and most of the Indigenous population decimated. And we don’t have a
