This book explores Jamaican-American author Michelle Cliff’s (1946–2016)
literary rebellion against the colonial, gendered and racist norms of
Western Modernity. It studies the sexualized circuits of the Atlantic
world, drawing on the fields of literary criticism, feminist theories,
queer studies and Caribbean studies. In order to do this, the book
develops the theoretical paradigm of intersectionality. It also
addresses the disturbing questions concerning the sexual politics of
transatlantic modernity as represented in Cliff’s novels.

Cliff’s
rebellious poetics envisions the colonial Caribbean past in new ways.
Her novels tell stories about Caribbean queer characters setting the
queer as a site of postcolonial agency and as a perspective out of which
colonial history can be re-written. This book considers myths, rites,
and cultural memory as sites of healing in the midst of colonial bodily
politics. Transnational histories, identity and ethics emerge as
intertwined in Cliff’s feminist novels.