Grace Nichols

by Sarah Lawson Welsh

This first full-length study of Grace Nichols's work argues that, rather than exploring the tension between its 'Caribbeaness' and 'Britishness', it is more productively read in terms of a series of border crossings. Nichols's major female protagonists are seen as epic journeyers travelling across different cultural and psychic landscapes. It shows how her poetry explores the boundaries of race, class and gender as part of the lived experience of being a black woman in Britain and the study focuses on the specifics of black British women's writing, different feminist reading strategies, rewriting history and revisioning myth in Nichols's poetry and the nature of diaspora, cultural hybridity and the complex meaning of 'home' for the migrant writer.

168 pages, Paperback

First published June 15, 2007