Citation

Watson SS. Cincinnati Romance Review 2016; 40: 201-214.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2016)

DOI

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PMID

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Abstract

Contemporary black female Hispanic Caribbean writers deal with race and gender differently from their literary predecessors. Born in 1972 in Panama City, Panama, Melanie Taylor Herrera is a black female Caribbean writer who is conscious of her racial identity yet is neither defined nor limited by it. Unlike the black female Cuban poet Nancy Morejón who declared both her race and gender in her 1975 seminal poem "Mujer negra" or "Black Woman," Taylor Herrera's short stories distance themselves from an exclusively racialized discourse but continue being informed by it. While Morejón identifies as both female and black, Taylor Herrera identifies as an urban woman defined by contemporary issues that affect women of African and non-African descent. Thus, the characters who populate her fiction display concerns of modern women such as motherhood, divorce, isolation, solitude, and suicide. In the second decade of the 21st century, Taylor Herrera's racial and gender identification underscore the multifaceted identity of the Caribbean woman in her quest to distinguish herself in an urban, cosmopolitan, and globalized society. The following analysis proposes to assay Taylor Herrera's short story collections Camino a Mariato [Walk to Mariato, 2009], Amables predicciones [Friendly Predictions, 2005] and Tiempos acuáticos (Aquatic Times, 2000) with the aim to conceptualize the redefinition of the Afra-Panamanian woman in the current century.

Language: en

Keywords

Suicide; Race; Identity; Black; Isolation; Afra-Panamanian; Hispanic Caribbean women; Solitude