This exploration of the poetry and prose of Caribbean women writers reveals in their imagery a rich tradition of erotic relations between women
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In Thiefing Sugar, Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley explores the poetry and prose of Caribbean women writers, revealing in their imagery a rich tradition of erotic relations between women. She takes the book's title from Dionne Brand's novel In Another Place, Not Here, where eroticism between women is likened to the sweet and subversive act of cane cutters stealing sugar. The natural world is repeatedly reclaimed and reinterpreted to express love between women in the poetry and prose that Tinsley analyzes. She not only recuperates stories of Caribbean women loving women, stories that have been ignored or passed over by postcolonial and queer scholarship until now, she also shows how those erotic relations and their literary evocations form a poetics and politics of decolonization. Tinsley's interpretations of twentieth-century literature by Dutch-, English-, and French-speaking women from the Caribbean take into account colonialism, migration, labor history, violence, and revolutionary politics. Throughout Thiefing Sugar, Tinsley connects her readings to contemporary matters such as neoimperialism and international LGBT and human-rights discourses. She explains too how the texts that she examines intervene in black feminist, queer, and postcolonial studies, particularly when she highlights the cultural limitations of the metaphors that dominate queer theory in North America and Europe, including those of the closet and "coming out."
“"Tinsely's fascinating study is noteworthy for its originality in scope and its depth. The author deftly demonstrates that the secret of Caribbean lesbian writing -- visible and invisible, white and of color, Francophone and Anglophone --is determined by constantly unfolding spaces that are impossible to define by the canonical -colonial tropes of the past."”
"Luscious, abundant, and rich, those are apt words for Thiefing Sugar, this captivating and lyrical exploration of what it meant in the twentieth century to be a Caribbean woman who loves women. Based on a well-chosen corpus of texts and lucid, in-depth analyses, the book is altogether a feast for the senses, a gift to us all!!"oGloria Wekker, Utrecht University "Through writing that is as lyrical as the poetry and fiction she analyzes, Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley makes connections between sugar production in the Caribbean, the paradoxical 'ungendering' of black female slaves that make their sexual self-hood possible, and the landscape of the 'Global South,' to argue that the history of the black woman's body in the African Diaspora is shrouded not just in metaphor, but in the materiality of their own world-making."oE. Patrick Johnson, author of Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity
Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Minnesota.
"Luscious, abundant and rich-those are apt words forThiefing Sugar, this captivating and lyrical exploration of what it meant in the twentieth century to be a Caribbean woman who loves women. Based on a well-chosen corpus of texts and lucid, in-depth analyses, the book is altogether a feast for the senses, a gift to us all!!"-Gloria Wekker, Utrecht University, Netherlands
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