9 Decolonial Poetics and Queer Resistance in Anglophone Afro-Caribbean Women’s Literature Angelique V. Nixon Anglophone Caribbean literature written by Black women writers across the diaspora in the 1980s emerges as a transformative, genre-bending, and defiant force. This period of Caribbean literature can be described as a period of transition that reflects the contradictory experiences of postco- lonial island-nations grappling with governance, migration, failed and uneven development, and the unfinished (failed) project of decolonization. Caribbean writers located inside and outside the region have long taken up the challenge of re-presenting and affirming the complexity of the region’s histories, languages, stories, myths, cultures, and identities. Caribbean women writers during this period addressed this project through multiple genres – novels, poetry, essays, and plays – and paid careful needed attention to the lives of women who countered the male-dominated Caribbean literary canon of the 1920s to 1970s (namely, CLR James, Derek Walcott, George Lamming, Kamau Brathwaite, V. S. Naipaul, Sam Selvin, Earl Lovelace, among others). The evolution of Black women’s writing across the diaspora through the 1980s and into the 1990s reflects a clear shift and response to the interlocking systems of oppression affect- ing the lives of Black women. For Caribbean migrant and Caribbean American Black women, these intersections and complexities are layered with the traumatic experiences of migration and coloniality while grap- pling with place and space, subjectivity and sexuality, identity and self- worth. This chapter highlights and reexamines the writings of Anglophone Afro-Caribbean women writers Dionne Brand and Michelle Cliff, as well as African Caribbean American writer Audre Lorde. I engage and offer connected readings of representations of histories, movement, language, sexuality, desire, and spirituality through their poetry and prose published from the 1980s into the early 1990s. This period of transition marks the rise of Caribbean women’s writing as a powerful reckoning with language, 187 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009179355.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press