Dreams of Archives Unfolded

JOCELYN FENTON STITT is Division Chair of Social Sciences, associate professor of Women's Studies, and affiliated faculty in Critical Studies of Race and Ethnicity, at St. Catherine University. Previously she was Director of Faculty Research Development at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, University of Michigan. She coedited Mothers Who Deliver: Feminist Interventions in Public and Interpersonal Discourse (2010) and Before Windrush: Recovering a Black and Asian Literary Heritage within Britain (2008).

• Introduction: Archival Dreams and Caribbean Life Writing 1 "Autobiography in a Graveyard": Doors of No Return and Revolutionary Failures 2 Speculative Autobiography: Ghosts and Feminist Fugitivity 3 Repicturing the Picturesque: Genealogical Desire, Archives, and Descendant Community Autobiography 4 Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust: Indo-Caribbean Archival Impossibility 5 "Put My Mom in There": Memorialization as Caribbean Counter-ArchiveCoda: Untelling HistoryAcknowledgmentsNotes Bibliography Index

"A text that connects the work of life writing by Caribbean women with alternative routes to and through history and memory in ways that affirm the power and reach of life writing as works of witness, realizing the dream of creating a livable past that archives themselves cannot unfold. As lifewriting studies continues to grapple with the ethics and aesthetics of witnessing, Stitt's book constitutes an important intervention, because it values the work of nonfiction as evidence, feeling, and response to what must always remain incomplete."— Julie Rak, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly"Introducing an innovative theoretical framing of long-standing critical debates about history, biography, archive, and belonging, this lucid study of Caribbean women's life-writing points to their remarkable contributions to new modes of knowledge production about the past and its aporias. Stitt's analyses of the writers' imaginative formal strategies are a timely and valuable intervention in Caribbean and Gender Studies."— Françoise Lionnet, author of Writing Women and Critical Dialogues: Subjectivity, Gender, and Irony"In Dreams of Archives Unfolded, Jocelyn Stitt answers the 'Caribbean quarrel with history' by convincingly arguing for the place of contemporary Caribbean women's memoir, from across its diasporas and linguistic schisms, as integral to the constitution of our archives, past and future. A well-argued work which will open new vistas for scholars of women's life-writing and Caribbean studies in the, hoped for, decolonial future."— Myriam J. A. Chancy, author of Autochthonomies: Transnationalism, Testimony, and Transmission in the African Diaspora