Wicked Flesh Wins a Barbara Christian Literary Prize Honorable Mention

CSA Barbara T. Christian Literary Award

CSA45 Guyana Award Ceremony- Virtual- June 4.2021

Shared by Chenzira Davis Kahina, Director of the VI Caribbean Cultural Center at the University of the Virgin Islands; Chair of the CSA Barbara T. Christian Literary Award Committee; CSA Vice President 2021-2022

Sharing Caribbean American Heritage Month (CAHM) annually celebrated in June, the CSA 45th Conference hosted in Guyana, virtual and hybrid for the first-time in CSA’s history, has authentically created challenges blended with creative opportunities for CSA to continue serving as a beacon of Caribbean Studies. With more than two dozen publications submitted and reviews completed virtually even during limitations created by the public health pandemic, a winner of this literary book award has required more extensive time and distanced engagement as every publication submitted presented a multiplicity of strengths and challenges in alignment with the stellar research, teaching and publications of Dr. Barbara T. Christian (MSRIP). The CSA Barbara T. Christian Literary Award Committee is currently comprised of Snt Dr. Chenzira Davis-Kahina of the VI Caribbean Cultural Center at the University of the Virgin Islands (Committee Chairwoman), Sis Dr. Sandra Richards of the University of the West Indies, and Dr. Nicholas Faraclas of the University of Puerto Rico- Rio Piedras.

CSA is delighted to announce the winner of the Barbara T. Christian Literary Award 2021:

Dr. Patricia Mohammed for her publication, Writing Gender into the Caribbean

(Hansib Publications, 2021).

Congratulations are extended on behalf of CSA, the CSA Barbara T. Christian Literary Award Committee, and the Family of the late Dr. Barbara T. Christian.

Dr. Patricia Mohammed’s work is a masterpiece which will have a lasting impact on Caribbean Studies. It definitely helps us to question and problematize a number of notions that are usually taken for granted in both academic and non-academic discourse on the Caribbean. This pioneering book centers both intersectionality and Caribbean-American feminist/gender/queer analyses with extensive research, literary creativity, and sensual intelligence. Mohammed’s publication exposes the complexities of feminism, developmental thought, gender awareness, sexual physiologies, and Caribbean perspectives of gender experiencing drastic transformations throughout her extensive research and literary writings. Mohammed’s work provides comprehensive, creative and innovative literary critical theory that envelopes transculturalism, translingualism, and respectful inclusivity of diversity, equity and advocacy for centering and grounding gender studies, development, affairs and spaces within the 21st century.

Mohammed’s work complements and reflects the essence of the Barbara T. Christian Literary Award as expressed by Dr. Barbara T. Christian:

“For I feel that the new emphasis on literary critical theory is as hegemonic as the world which it attacks. I see the language it creates as one which mystifies rather than clarifies our condition, making it possible for a few people who know that particular language to control the critical scene—that language surfaced, interestingly enough, just when the literature of peoples of color, of black women, of Latin Americans, of Africans began to move to ‘the center’.” (Christian: 1994) From “The Race for Theory” in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, Ed. Angeles Mitchell, Duke University Press.

Here are excerpts from award-winning author Dr. Patricia Mohammed’s Writing Gender into the Caribbean:

“I recognize that a running theme throughout my work is an appeal to the concept of negotiating change gradually, incrementally, but firmly. Gender beliefs and ideologies are always catching up with actual gender practices and expanding ideas about gender equality.

…As I still continue to work in gender scholarship and feminist activism, I have come to believe that feminism needs more advancing and less reproach, more solidarities and less fragmentation, a point that might well apply to all profound social movements that sustain and do good work. I hope that this book leaves the reader with the view that feminists have already left the world a better place than we found it, for both sexes…

…This increasingly complex and complicated unfolding of gender as an analytical category in developmental thinking does not always accommodate policy making at global and societal level as it requires states, groups, individuals, all the players to “think critically about how the meanings of sexed bodies are produced in relation to one another, how these meanings are deployed and changed…

…Despite the ongoing difficulties that remain in convincing nations and institutions that fairness in treatment and inclusivity of gender difference will reveal sustainable gains, my sincere optimism of the potential of gender as a conceptual field to create social change for the greater good lies in one solid fact. Gender awareness emerged by the early twenty-first century as a marker of the advancement of societies in the space of just over one hundred years. To have gained so much traction in such accelerated time signals the human capacity for accommodating real progress…”

(Mohammed : 2021)

As the 2021 winner of the Barbara T. Christian Literary Award, Dr. Patricia Mohammed, will receive $500.00USD, a certificate, and hand-crafted artwork gifts from the Family of Dr. Barbara T. Christian represented by her sister Dr. Cora Christian-Hendrickson and her brother-in-law Dr. Simon B. Jones-Hendrickson who are both CSA Past Presidents.

The CSA Barbara T. Christian Literary Award Committee selected three authors worthy of honorable mention:

Comrade Sister: Caribbean Feminist Revisions of the Grenada Revolution by Laurie R. Lambert. University of Virginia Press 2020

Lambert provides an eloquent and well-researched publication reimagining the Grenada Revolution beyond the patriarchal overtly masculine narratives customarily associated with and within the New Jewel Movement. Lambert’s work includes references to Merle Hodge, Dessima Williams, Claudette Pitt, Tessa Stroude, and others as a new generation of Caribbean women leaders central to revolutionary politics blended with intersectionality, Caribbean sovereignty, intergenerational trauma and transgender spaces.

Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World by Jessica Marie Johnson. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020

Johnson’s publication is a literary treasure explicating intimacy and kinship as strategies for survival of women of African descent for free status oftentimes unsuccessfully overlapping cultural heritage traditions of Anglophone and Francophone West African ethnic nations Wolof, Mandingo, Bambara, Senegal, and Congo with connections to Louisiana and other US southern regions. Johnson examined the development of colonial enslavement policies, gender affairs, and how New Orleans prospered on unjust enrichment fueled by women of African descent reshaped the 19th century and beyond.

Santeria, Vodou and Resistance in Caribbean Literature: Daughters of the Spirits by Paul Humphrey. Legenda Books (UK) 2019

Humphrey’s publication shared African derived spirituality practices of Vodou and Santeria as sources of strength and sites for resistance. With creatively interspersed linkages to ancestral deities like Mother Warriors Ezili Danto and Ezili Freda, Humphrey critiqued sacred rites linked to vengeance, sexuality, death, rape and sacrifice comparatively through plays and novels of Cuba, Haiti and other Caribbean isles. The devastation of the Haiti Earthquake of 2010 was examined within a trans-Caribbean framework of intergenerational narratives where women’s voices were central.

CSA and the wider Caribbean Global community are encouraged to welcome, celebrate and extend congratulations to the newest award-winning author of the CSA Barbara T. Christian Literary Award for 2021- Dr. Patricia Mohammed! Here is the list of awardees from 2015 to present:

Marisa J. Fuentes for Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence and the Archive (University of Pennsylvania Press © 2016) AND Brendan Jamal Thornton for Negotiating Respect: Pentecostalism, Masculinity and the Politics of Spiritual Authority in the Dominican Republic (University Press of Florida © 2016) – CSA2017 in the Bahamas

CONGRATULATIONS

Dr. Patricia Mohammed

Winner of the CSA Barbara T. Christian Literary Award 2021

See full new press release here: https://www.caribbeanstudiesassociation.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/CSA_Newsletter_July_2021_FINAL_web.pdf

J M JohnsonAugust 3, 2021