This talk offers a new reading of postcolonial women's writings. The conventional

model since the 1980s has been to emphasize issues of silence and invisibility,

the desire for voice and narrative space, and self-representation as a form of

empowerment and transformation. What is often eclipsed as a result is a valuable

political ethic based on coalition and solidarity with oppressed and marginalized

figures. By working across an expansive literary archive, stretching from Mary Prince's

slave narrative to more recent works by Miriama Ba, Bapsi Sidhwa, Edwidge Danticat

and Shani Mootoo, Professor Donnell identifies an alternative framework for reading

postcolonial women's writing, presenting a new model of feminist criticism rooted in

solidarity and coalitional ethics. Alison Donnell is reader in the Department of English and American Studies

at the University of Reading, UK. She is the author of Twentieth Century Caribbean

Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary and Critical History and has

been a Joint Editor of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies

since its founding in 1998.