Representations of Indigenous Women in Cultural Texts Set in British Guiana/Guyana

My thesis is the first full length study of representations of Indigenous women in Anglophone Caribbean literature. It explores the representation of Indigenous women in a variety of cultural texts set in British Guiana/Guyana, from the nineteenth century to the present. It also focuses on texts which have been neglected in the criticism regarding Indigenous women’s representation. Most of the works I discuss present Indigenous women in problematic ways, but I argue that the women’s obscured and peripheral presence within the texts offers opportunity for interpreting and rereading them in ways that make Indigenous women central. My thesis therefore focuses on and explores the complexities of Indigenous women’s existence and identity within modernity. My emphasis on centring and affirming the place of Indigenous women in their families and societies builds on Indigenous feminism.

The texts I analyse include nineteenth and twentieth-century travel writing, imperial romance novels, post-war literary fiction and photographs from the travel texts. My thesis argues that the representation of women in these works is influenced by genre, as well as political, historical and socioeconomic contexts. Throughout, the thesis establishes the centrality of women in Indigenous social organisation, Indigenous knowledge, cultural heritage, cosmologies and history. While some of the texts reveal women’s vulnerability to marginalisation and abuse, I argue that these are connected to larger issues such as resource extraction and insecure land tenure and rights for Guyanese Indigenous Peoples. Additionally, I posit that many of the women represented in the texts have agency, even when their authors attempt to show them as victimised Others. Finally, my thesis also examines how Indigenous women are presented in relation to the different representations of the coastal and hinterland landscapes, which influence the women’s positioning in many of the works.