Preliminary Material -- Sexual Feelings Beside(s) Each Other: Reading and Situating Caribbean (Literary) Sexualities -- Reading the Ambivalence of Sexuality in Transition / Erna Brodber and Oonya Kempadoo -- Ways of Reading Sexual Shame, Violence, and Pain / Edwidge Danticat , Adisa Opal Palmer and Brodber Erna -- Communities That Heal – Reading Sexual Healing / Danticat Edwidge , Adisa Opal Palmer , Brodber Erna and Mootoo Shani -- Shadow(ing) Men – Visions of Caring Masculinities / Brodber Erna , Adisa Opal Palmer and Mootoo Shani -- ‘Caribbean Passion’ – The Hypersexual and the Asexual Woman as Reparative Tropes / Adisa Opal Palmer and Mootoo Shani -- Sisters Together and Apart: Towards an Affective Phenomenology of Reading -- Works Cited -- Index.

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The present book offers a reader-theoretical model for approaching anglophone Caribbean women’s writing through affects, emotions, and feelings related to sexuality, a prominent theme in the literary tradition. How does an affective framework help us read this tradition of writing that is so preoccupied with sexual feelings? The novelists discussed in the book – chiefly Erna Brodber, Opal Palmer Adisa, Edwidge Danticat, Shani Mootoo, and Oonya Kempadoo – are representative of various anglophone Caribbean island cultures and English-speaking back¬grounds. The study makes astute use of the theoretical writings of such scholars as Sara Ahmed, Milton J. Bennett, Sue Campbell, Linden Lewis, Evelyn O’Callaghan, Lizabeth Paravisini – Gebert, Lynne Pearce, Elspeth Probyn, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Rei Terada, as well as the critical writings of Adisa, Brodber, Kempadoo, to shape an individual, focused argument. The works of the creative artists treated, and this volume, hold sexuality and emo¬tions to be vital for meaning-production and knowledge-negotiation across diffe¬rences (be they culturally, geographi¬cally or otherwise marked) that chal¬lenge the postcolonial reading process.