What Women Lose

The Author: María Cristina Rodríguez obtained her Ph.D. in comparative literature at the Graduate Center/City University of New York and teaches at the Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras campus. She is co-editor of Sargasso, a journal of Caribbean studies, and film critic for the weekly newspaper Claridad. She has published widely in scholarly journals on Caribbean women’s writings, ideology in film, and migration and diaspora narratives.

«This manuscript offers fascinating and vivid details about Caribbean migrant women’s writing. The main characters come from Spanish-, French-, and English-speaking homelands. María Cristina Rodríguez has analyzed a considerable amount of novels that focus on the energy and expectations involved in these personal and professional enterprises. She especially addresses the tensions between key issues such as the adaptation to the global cities and the memories from the Caribbean in past and present. This is certainly one of the broadest presentations of literature by Caribbean women who write about migrating from the Caribbean to the United States, Canada, and Europe. The author gives a vivid picture of the diversity of cultural encounters from the perspective of these female citizens in the effort to improve their professional and personal lifestyles.» (Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger, professor and critic of ‘Caribbean literature’, Free University of Berlin and University of Maryland)«In an age of travel, exile, and human displacement of all sorts, how have marginalized women undergone the trials of the migrant experience? María Cristina Rodríguez’s book brilliantly answers this question by examining the works of a well-known constellation of women writers from the francophone, hispanophone and anglophone Caribbean, among them Maryse Condé, Edwidge Dandicat, Julia Álvarez, Esmeralda Santiago, Michelle Cliff and Jamaica Kincaid. Their narratives, shaped out their own lives and different backgrounds, are analyzed through a rich array of readings, from the historical to the sociological, from the anthropological and cultural to the geographic. Moreover, this ground-breaking work is important not only because it represents the three major linguistic areas of the Antilles but also because it proves that Caribbean women, while re-inventing themselves in their new socio-cultural environments, are able to preserve their Caribbean cultural origins.» (Antonio Benítez-Rojo, writer and critic, Amherst College)