Thiefing Sugar

In Thiefing Sugar Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley explores the poetry and prose of Caribbean women writers, revealing in their imagery a rich tradition of erotic relations between women. She takes the book's title from Dionne Brand's novel In Another Place, Not Here, where eroticism between women is likened to the sweet and subversive act of cane cutters stealing sugar. The natural world is repeatedly reclaimed and reinterpreted to express love between women in the poetry and prose Tinsley analyzes. She not only recuperates stories of Caribbean women-loving women, which have been ignored or passed over by postcolonial and queer scholarship until now; she also shows how those erotic relations and their literary evocations form a poetics and politics of decolonization. Her interpretations of twentieth-century literature by women from the Dutch-, English-, and French- speaking Caribbean take into account colonialism, migration, labour history, violence, and revolutionary politics. Throughout Thiefing Sugar, Tinsley connects her readings to contemporary matters such as neo-imperialism and international GLBT and human-rights discourses. She explains too how the texts she examines intervene in black feminist, queer, and postcolonial studies, not least by highlighting the cultural limitations of the metaphors that dominate queer theory in North America and Europe, including those of the closet and "coming out."