From Readers to Readers: Sovereign Acts of Reading in Anglophone Caribbean Women's Writing

Abstract The struggle for sovereign reading is constitutive of Caribbean literature, and the long durée of colonialism and postcolonialism mean that it is still a current topic. In the Anglophone Caribbean, writers such as George Lamming, C. L. R. James, Derek Walcott, Austin Clarke, M. NourbeSe Philip, Jamaica Kincaid, and Michelle Cliff have all put the formation of the reading subject at the heart of Caribbean self-making. But it is only with Dionne Brand's An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading that we have an explicit theory of Caribbean, ethical reader-response criticism. In response to Brand's essay, this article considers the idea of reading for one's mother as a governing metaphor in Caribbean literature and the ironies and problems with this metaphor as theorized in the works of three Anglophone Caribbean women writers: Jamaica Kincaid, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Dionne Brand.