Carole Boyce Davies

International Dimensions of Black Women's Writing

Boyce Davies is a leading authority on Black women writing cross-culturally. Her book Black Women Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (Routledge, 1994) is a study of Black women’s writing, broadening the discourse surrounding the representation of and by Black women and women of color. It explores a complex set of interrelated issues, establishing the significance of such wide-ranging subjects as: re-mapping, re-naming and cultural crossings; gender, heritage and identity; African women’s writing and resistance to domination; marginality, effacement and decentering; gender, language and the politics of location. She also edited the Volumes One and Two of Moving Beyond Boundaries: International Dimensions of Black Women’s Writing (with Molara Ogundipe-Leslie) and Black Women’s Diasporas, a major contribution to our understanding of the issues, experiences, and concerns of Black women writing in different communities and in a wide range of geographic contexts. Covering writers from Africa, Brazil, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Europe, and such well-known authors as Zora Neale Hurston, Nadine Gordimer, and bell hooks, it contains both creative and critical writings, and by considering the area of critical writing as critical conversation, it allows writer and critic to speak with each other in the creation of the critical voice.

Recovering Claudia Jones

Trinidad-born intellectual-activist Claudia Jones (1915-1964) had long remained outside of academic consideration before Boyce Davies restored her to global, intellectual prominence. In her prize-winning book Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Duke University Press, 2008), Boyce Davies assesses the activism, writing, and legacy of Claudia Jones, a pioneering Afro-Caribbean radical intellectual, dedicated communist, and feminist. Jones is buried in London’s Highgate Cemetery, to the left of Karl Marx—a location that Boyce Davies finds fitting given how Jones expanded Marxism-Leninism to incorporate gender and race in her political critique and activism. She is also the editor of Claudia Jones: Beyond Containment (Ayebia Clarke Publishing, 2011), which brings together for the first time the essays, poetry, and autobiographical and other writings of Claudia Jones.

Leading Scholarship on Caribbean Women Writers

Carole Boyce Davies has also established herself as a major scholar of Caribbean women writers. Along with Elaine Savory Fido, she coedited Out of Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, the first collection of critical essays on Caribbean women’s literature. The book not only created a field of literary criticism which engaged the absence of women writers from the Caribbean literary canon as it established the presence of these writers historically. But by expanding the narrow terms of Western feminist discourse, it also revitalized Caribbean literature and criticism. Using the metaphor of the “Kumbla” or “calabash” used to protect precious objects, first used by writer Erna Brodber, coming “Out of the Kumbla” then signified a movement from confinement to visibility, articulation, and activism, a process which allowed for a multiplicity of moves, exteriorized, no longer contained and protected or dominated.

African Diaspora Studies/Decolonizing Discourses

Boyce Davies is widely recognized as a trailblazer in African Diaspora Studies. She served as the general editor of Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora: Origins, Experiences, and Culture (three-volume set), the only single-source collection of the most current scholarship on all aspects of the African Diaspora. Five hundred years of relocation and dislocation, of assimilation and separation has produced a rich tapestry of history and culture into which are woven people, places, and events. This authoritative, accessible work reveals the strands of the tapestry, telling the story of diverse peoples, separated by time and distance, but retaining a commonality of origin and experience. In collaboration with her former students Meredith Gadsby, Charles Peterson, and Henrietta Williams, she edited Decolonizing the Academy: African Diaspora Studies. It asserts that the academy is perhaps the most colonized space. In the twenty-first century, this has become even clearer now that the academy remains one of the primary sites for the production and re-production of ideas that serve the interests of colonizing powers and its disciplines have yet to be decolonized. This collection of essays argues that African diaspora theory has the possibility of interrupting the current colonizing process and re-engaging the decolonizing process at the level of the mind. In addition, it contends that this will be an ongoing project worthy of being undertaken in a variety of fields of study as we confront the challenges of the twenty-first century. This assertion has proven revelatory given the current prominence of decolonial discourses.

Caribbean Spaces

Both a memoir and a scholarly study, her book Caribbean Spaces: Escapes from Twilight Zones (University of Illinois Press, 2013) explores the multivalent meanings of Caribbean space and community in a cross-cultural and transdisciplinary perspective. Throughout, Boyce Davies demonstrates how Caribbean cultures circulate internationally and how a Caribbean perspective has linked her political vision to broader currents of the Black World including the Civil Rights Movement, the environmental catastrophes of Haiti, the failure of the New Orleans levies during Hurricane Katrina, and the use of modern technologies such as smartphones and global positioning systems within the Caribbean. Ultimately, Boyce Davies reestablishes the connections between theory and practice, intellectual work and activism, and personal and private space.

Black Women and Political Leadership

Currently, Boyce Davies is working on a new book project on “Black Women and Political Leadership in the African Diaspora.” She has already published a number of essays in this area such as: 1. “First Ladies/First Wives, First Women Presidents: Sexuality, Leadership and Power in the African Diaspora,” in Michelle Obama’s Impact on African American Women and Girls, eds. Paula Seniors, Michelle Duster, and Rose Thevenin (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

2. “Writing Black Women into Political Leadership: Reflections, Trends and Contradictions,” in Black Women and International Law: Deliberate Interactions, Movements and Actions, ed. Jeremy Levitt (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2015): 23-34.

3. “‘She Wants the Black Man’s Post’: Sexuality and Race in the Construction of Women’s Leadership in Diaspora,” Agenda (South Africa) 25, no. 4 (2011): 121-133.

4. “Con-di-fi-cation: Black Women, Leadership and Political Power,” Feminist Africa, March, 2007.[Reprinted as “Con-di-fi-cation: Black Women, Leadership, and Political Power,” in Still Brave: The Evolution of Black Women’s Studies, eds. Stanlie James, Frances Smith Foster, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: Feminist Press, 2009): 392-414.]