Regarded Self

Kaiama L. Glover is Ann Whitney Olin Professor of French and Africana Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is coeditor of The Haiti Reader: History, Culture, Politics, also published by Duke University Press, and author of Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon.

“Kaiama L. Glover's magnificently written A Regarded Self recovers voices long relegated to the margins. It is also a new and thrilling kind of criticism, uncompromising in its resistance to generalities about Afro-Atlantic and Caribbean Studies. Seamlessly joining literary reflection and oral history, it unveils a new understanding of the aesthetic and the political. For once returned to their significant histories in the Caribbean, these magisterial terms gain force and momentum. Glover's unparalleled analyses of Maryse CondÉ, RenÉ Depestre, and Jamaica Kincaid make readers rethink the nature of mastery and subjection, as well as the false divide between sacred and profane.” - Colin Dayan, author of (Haiti, History, and the Gods) “In this rigorous and elegantly executed book, Kaiama L. Glover performs the disorderly womanness that she theorizes by offering feminist challenges to established Caribbean scholarly practices, tropes, and readings that reinforce masculinist valorizations of ‘community.’ Offering innovative, unconventional perspectives on well-known literary texts, A Regarded Self stands to be an important work.” - Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley, author of (Ezili's Mirrors: Imagining Black Queer Genders) "Readers should be able to work their ways out of the boxes that define texts and approach them closely from less controlled zones. As such, Glover’s A Regarded Self is a timely and much-needed book, in these times when readers may feel compelled to pay allegiance to the labels and theories in vogue before actually regarding the source book itself." - Andrée-Anne Kekeh-Dika (Public Books) “In her groundbreaking new book, A Regarded Self, Kaiama Glover proposes an innovative theoretical framework for reappraising the role of Caribbean women in literature and literary criticism.... This book will appeal to both specialist and general readers, but it is particularly compelling in its enactment of a new way of approaching literature from the region.” - Bonnie Thomas (L'Esprit Créateur) “Kaiama L. Glover’s A Regarded Self is a thought-provoking and innovative contribution to Caribbean literary criticism as it subversively engages with Caribbean ideological idiosyncrasies and self-reflexively unsettles established academic positions. . . .  Its combination of textual and extra-textual analysis provides a comprehensive insight into anglophone and francophone Caribbean literature, culture and scholarship.”- Isabella Kalte (KULT Online) “A Regarded Self is about disorderly women who endlessly unsettle any given structure. . . . Glover invites us to think through what it would mean to endlessly unsettle ourselves and everything around us.” - Marietta Kosma (Ideas) “Reading across some of the linguistic barriers within the Caribbean, [Glover] offers a text essential to scholars of Caribbean studies and which may be used to facilitate conversations across the islands (and scholarly departments). Always reading against the grain, always illuminating (the costs of ) our own readerly proclivities, [A Regarded Self] does not disappoint.” - Jocelyn Sutton Franklin (H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews) “Glover’s writing style remains fun and engaging throughout, her thoughts informative, and her thesis well-plotted. . . . ARegarded Self delivers a compelling analysis of Caribbean women writers and their traditionally unlikeable heroines, devoting itself to intersectionality and avoiding reiterations of previous scholarship.” - Kieran Leeds (European Journal of American Studies) "A Regarded Self therefore serves as an invaluable example of a study in self-disorientation, in being nimbly reactive and empathetic against the ossifying tendencies of many identity-based politics, while simultaneously opening up a more inclusive discursive space for selfhood that refuses to exclude any desires, no matter how selfish they may seem." - Jake J. McGuirk (Ariel)

• Introduction  11. Self-Love Tituba  392. Self-Possession Hadriana  683. Self-Defense Lotus  1114. Self-Preservation Xuela  1465. Self-Regard Lilith  188Epilogue  219Notes  225Works Cited  249Index