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Abstract

Following a context-based approach and the tenets of post-positivist realist theory, this paper will analyze two post-colonial Afro-Hispanic novels immersed in their articulation of moving towards Caribbeanness within the phenomenon of Diaspora Literacy: María Nsue Angüe’s Ekomo (1983) and Michelline Dusseck’s Caribbean Echoes (1997). As part of the Diaspora Literacy, these texts will be read employing the search for wholeness as a theoretical tool, towards an epistemology of anti-colonial feminist struggle. These texts take active part in a decolonizing process that fosters a definition and vision of agency which makes wholeness possible, becoming an active expression of black women’s spirituality across the Caribbean and the African Diaspora. Both novels are written in Spanish, thus their classification as Afro-Hispanic. The texts are a mixture of traditional African and Caribbean elements inserted in European contexts; for this reason they will be studied as part of migrant literature, configuring as minor literature. Both writers the first from Ecuatorial Guinea, and the second from Haiti, follow the paradigm of the suppression of silence, in a process that relocates the word to do the telling from an original, agentive point of view. They share a compromise to disassemble the paradigm of resistance and replace it with the paradigm of growth, following a democracy of narrative participation. Presenting alternative ways of knowing that emerge from their femaleness and which may differ from the deconstructionist narratives produced by post-colonial male writers, they build a constructionist discourse. Relying in their “oraliterature,” they move from their communities to the community of readers. These writers affirm the place of black women as creative artists who have fought not only the racism of the dominant culture but also the sexism of their own men.

Author Biography

Silvia Castro Borrego is Lecturer of English and North American literature and culture at the University of Málaga (Spain). She was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Washington during the academic year 1995-96, lecturer at the JFK Institute in Berlin (Germany) in the summer of 2003, and visiting scholar in the summers of 2012 and 2013 at Spelman College (Atlanta). She has published book chapters and articles on African American literature and the literature of the African diaspora.

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