SOURCE: O'Callaghan, Evelyn. “Feminist Consciousness: European/American Theory, Jamaican Stories.” Journal of Caribbean Studies 6, no. 2 (spring 1988): 143-62.

In the following essay, O'Callaghan considers the political orientation of contemporary West Indian women's fiction through an examination of four short story collections written by Jamaican female authors, including Senior's Summer Lightning.

The impetus for this paper was a desire to explore the political orientation of contemporary West Indian women's fiction. Four recently published collections of short stories by Jamaican women seemed a manageable starting point for a preliminary investigation: Olive Senior's Summer Lightning;¹ Hazel Campbell's Woman's Tongue;² The Sistren Collective's Lionheart Gal;³ and Opal Palmer Adisa's Bake Face and Other Guava Stories.⁴ Inevitably, a theoretical “clearing the decks” has made comprehensive textual analysis impossible given the restrictions of such an essay, so I'd like to start by briefly generalizing about the scope and content of each book.

Summer Lightning's...