Role

Dr Denise deCaires Narain was born in Guyana and has lived and taught in the Caribbean. She has published widely on Caribbean women’s writing and is interested in and published essays on the work of Jamaica Kincaid, Erna Brodber, Olive Senior and Shani Mootoo. Her monograph, Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Poetry: Making Style (Routledge, 2001) is the first sustained study of Caribbean women’s poetry. She is currently researching the gendered implications of debates about orality, sexuality and popular culture in the Caribbean and in the ongoing contestation over the relevance of the categories ‘postcolonial’ and ‘queer’ within the region. Her monograph on the Jamaican short story writer, poet and cultural archivist, Olive Senior, is due out in Summer 2011 (Northcote House). It explores the distinctive Creole poetics in Senior’s work, her subversive use of “devious respectability” and the ambivalence of her representation of migration as a guarantee of upward social mobility. Denise has recently co-edited a special edition of the Journal of West Indian Literature with Evelyn O’Callaghan and Alison Donnell on ‘Shani Mootoo: Writing, Difference and the Caribbean’. She is completing an essay, ‘After Creolization and Before Queer: Reflections on Naming Desire Between Women in Caribbean Literature’ which suggests returning to and revising the Caribbean creolization paradigm, rather than privileging queer interpretive strategies. She is also working on a book-length study, Strange Intimacies: Representing the Servant in Postcolonial Women’s Texts, which explores how the maid/madam relationship figures in contemporary postcolonial women’s texts. Focused largely on the Caribbean, Africa, India and their diasporas, this study will interrogate the challenges and possibilities for feminisms that these relationships suggest and the hybrid literary forms which emerge in the process. Writers to be discussed include: Jamaica Kincaid, Jean Rhys, Phyllis Shand Allfrey, Shani Mootoo, Olive Senior, Zoe Wicomb, Marlene Van Niekerk, Ama Ata Aidoo, Assia Djebar, Amma Darko, Gcina Mhlophe, Kiran Desai, Anita Desai, Kamila Shamsie, Bapsi Sidhwa and Attia Hosein.

She has supervised DPhil theses on the following topics:

2000: Chinese American women’s writing and the politics of translation;

2002: African women and feminism;

2003: Literary writing in Mauritius;

2004: Migrant women’s writing;

2008: Deconstruction and the Ethics of Reading Postcolonial Texts;

2009: South African writing in the period of transition (MPhil);

I am currently supervising the following:

DPhil, ‘Transnational queer politics: A Comparative study of Anglophone and South African literature and culture’;

MPhil on the work of Isabelle Eberhardt (co-supervisor, Matt Dimmock).

In January this year her DPhil student (co-supervised with Prof Step Newell), Taraneh Borbor, successfully defended her thesis, ‘Towards a New Geographical Consciousness: a study of place in the novels of V. S. Naipaul and J. M. Coetzee.’

She has been external examiner for a range of DPhil theses including: Caribbean Women Writers; Mixed-Race Identities in Caribbean Literature; Middle-Eastern Women's Writing and Culture; Black British Women Poets and Performance Poetry; Creoleness and Orality in the Caribbean; the Representation of Madness in Contemporary Black Literature; Rushdie, Atwood and Postcolonial Feminism. She has taught at the University of the West Indies in Barbados and acted as external examiner for programmes there and at the University of Guyana. She was also external examiner at the University of North London.

Administrative Role

She was Sub-Dean of Student Affairs for 4 years and Director of Student Support for 3 years.

MY OFFICE HOURS for Autumn 2008 are: MONDAY: 12.00-2.00 

(other times can be arranged via e-mail: safb4@sussex.ac.uk)

DeCaires Narain, Denise (2010) Affiliating Said closer to home: reading postcolonial women's texts. In: Edward Said: a legacy of emancipation and representation. University of California Press, Berkeley, pp. 121-141. ISBN 9780520245464

DeCaires Narain, Denise (2007) Landscape and poetic identity in Caribbean women's poetry. Ariel, 38 (2-3). pp. 41-64. ISSN 1920-1222

DeCaires Narain, Denise (2007) Gendering the Caribbean. In: Reading the Caribbean: approaches to anglophone Caribbean literature and culture. Universitatsverlag Winter, Heidelberg. ISBN 9783825353582

de Caires Narain, Denise (2006) Standing in the place of love: sex, love and loss in Jamaica Kincaid's writing. In: Gendered realities: an anthology of essays in Caribbean feminist thought. University of West Indies Press, pp. 334-357. ISBN 9789766401122

DeCaires Narain, Denise (2006) Living in the spell of history: the novels of Jamaica Kincaid. In: Centre of remembrance: memory and Caribbean women's literature. Mango Publishing, pp. 29-51. ISBN 9781902294025

DeCaires Narain, Denise (2005) Writing 'home': mediating between 'the local' and 'the literary' in a selection of postcolonial women's texts. Third World Quarterly, 26 (3). pp. 497-508. ISSN 0143-6597

DeCaires Narain, Denise (2004) Lorna Goodison with Denise deCaires Narain. In: Writing across worlds: contemporary writers talk. Unset, pp. 45-57. ISBN 9780415345668

DeCaires Narain, Denise (2004) What happened to global sisterhood? Writing and reading 'the' postcolonial woman. In: Third wave feminism: a critical exploration. Palgrave, Basingstoke, pp. 240-251. ISBN 9781403918215

DeCaires Narain, Denise (2003) Moving worlds with words: the postcolonial woman as writer in Jamaica Kincaid's fiction. Moving Worlds, 3 (2). pp. 70-83. ISSN 1474-4600

DeCaires Narain, Denise (2002) Contemporary Caribbean women's poetry: making style. Routledge, London ; New York. ISBN 9780415218122

DeCaires Narain, Denise (1999) The body of the woman in the body of the text: the novels of Erna Brodber. In: Caribbean women writers: fiction in English. Macmillan, pp. 97-116. ISBN 9780312218638

DeCaires Narain, Denise (1998) Body talk: writing and speaking the body in the texts of Caribbean women writers. In: Caribbean portraits: essays on gender ideologies and identities. Ian Randle Publishers, Kingston, 255 -275. ISBN 9789768123565