ALTHEA PRINCE’S LOVING THIS MAN: AN INTERSECTIONAL APPROACH TO MIGRATION, GENDER AND RACE POLITICS

Abstract

This article provides an intersectional analysis of Loving this Man (2001), the first novel published by Caribbean-Canadian writer and sociologist Althea Prince. The analysis approaches different aspects tackled in the novel, mostly connected to the complexity of the migration experience and to gender and race politics in the different contexts where the story is set, namely, an unnamed Caribbean country and Canada. Loving this Man revises the vital experience and the achievement of a sense of identity of Sayshelle, a yound Caribbean woman who migrates to Canada at the end of her teenage years. An adult Sayshelle narrates her life, beginning with her childhood and early adolescence in the Caribbean to, in the second part of the novel, delve on her early youth experiences in Canada. Both periods and contexts are strongly influenced by gender and race politics: in the Caribbean because of the continuance of social structures inherited from colonialism and with a strong patriarchal component, and in Canada because Sayshelle arrives there precisely at the end of the 1960s, when the social mobilization of the Black population, as it happened in the US, gained strength and momentum. In definitive, the novel is structured following a traditional pattern of migration narratives (here vs. there), while migration remains the vital experience which articulates the tale and leads it towards its conclusion, when a mature Sayshelle is finally seen to have achieved a sense of identity and belonging.