Drawing on both personal experience and critical theory, Carole Boyce Davies illuminates the dynamic complexity of Caribbean culture and traces its migratory patterns throughout the Americas. Both a memoir and a scholarly study, Caribbean Spaces: Escapes from Twilight Zones explores the multivalent meanings of Caribbean space and community in a cross-cultural and transdisciplinary perspective. From her childhood in Trinidad and Tobago to life and work in communities and universities in Nigeria, Brazil, England, and the United States, Carole Boyce Davies portrays a rich and fluid set of personal experiences. She reflects on these movements to understand the interrelated dynamics of race, gender, and sexuality embedded in Caribbean spaces, as well as many Caribbean people's traumatic and transformative stories of displacement, migration, exile, and sometimes return. Ultimately, Boyce Davies reestablishes the connections between theory and practice, intellectual work and activism, and personal and private space.
| Cover Title Page Contents Acknowledgments Introduction. Caribbean Spaces: Reflective Essays/Creative-Theoretical Circulations 1. Between the Twilight Zone and the Underground Railroad: "Owega" 2. Reimagining the Caribbean: Seeing, Reading, Thinking 3. Caribbean/American: The Portable Black Self in Community 4. Spirit Scapes: From Brazil to the Caribbean 5. Middle Passages: Movable Borders and Ocean-Air Space Mobility 6. Women, Labor, and the Transnational: From Work to Work 7. Connecting Stories: My Grandmother's Violin 8. "Changing Locations": Literary Pathways of Caribbean Migration 9. "Haiti, I Can See Your Halo!": Living on Fault Lines 10. Caribbean GPS: Compasses of Racialization 11. Circulations: Caribbean Political Activism 12. My Father Died a Second Time 13. Postscript: Escape Routes Bibliography Index | "Persuasive and comprehensive, Caribbean Spaces achieves an intriguing sequence of intricate journeys through Caribbean and African diasporic cultural spaces, political landscapes, historiographies, and literary-artistic terrains, each keenly observed. The result is a powerful engagement of the politics and realities of diaspora with black women's histories in particular." —Thomas Glave, author of Among the Bloodpeople: Politics and Flesh

"I can't think of a book that better combines the experiential with the theoretical, the political with the commonsensical, in prose that is lyrical, evocative, and lucid."—Kenneth A. McClane, W.E.B. DuBois Professor of Literature, Cornell University
"Eminently readable and often entertaining... Instead of going easy on the spices, Boyce Davies provides us with a savory feast of experiences, memories, and reflections on her personal and professional life."—Research in African Literatures
| Carole Boyce Davies is a professor of Africana studies and English at Cornell University. Her many works include Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones and the three-volume Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora: Origins, Experiences, and Culture.