Mappinng postcolonial diasporas and intimacy discourses in the writings of Opal Palmer Adisa

Abstract

In postcolonial studies, diasporic criticism has proved to be very useful at destabilizing the limitations and prescriptions of a nationalist approach in cultural studies. Similarly, intimacy discourses have emerged to undermine hegemonic notions of public/private and personal/political. Defining the literary production of Afro-Caribbean women writers implies to address processes of identity formation in matters of racial, cultural, geographical and gender belonging. One of the objects of studying Opal Palmer Adisa's texts is to identify and scrutinize her attempts to engage and disable hegemonic discourses on the proper relation between public and private spaces, which have generally been associated with the gendered division of labor. It is my contention that in addressing domestic and intimate spaces for the recreation of one's culture—and in bringing them into the spaces of the imagination that geographical displacement entails—writers in the diaspora like Adisa are bringing forward the importance of recreating personal, valuable cultural references that help to preserve the notion of homeland without falling into nationalist essentialisms. The contents of intimacy discourses, in this sense, prove to be as powerful and influential as any other external authority, inasmuch as both the phenomenology of feeling and the birth of a nation are products of our common cultural imagination.