Triangular Voyages: Locating the Transnational Caribbean Woman in Paule Marshall's "To Da-duh, in Memoriam"

Paule Marshall's short story "To Da-duh" offers a pioneering theorization of transnationalism for black Caribbean women, particularly Barbadian women. Examining black female characters' navigation of archetypcal environments in symbolically loaded vehicles and interrogating the representations of black women bodies as complex discursive spaces, the essay explores Barbadian women's struggles with latent colonial paradigms and highlights women's assertions of agency and their challenging of limiting constructs. Utilizing the theoretical insights of numerous transnational and African diasporic scholars, the essay foregrounds issues that have come to define notions of transnationalism, and it elucidates their specific implications for Caribbean women; these issues include representations of home and ancestral connections, negotiations of public and domestic spaces, and depictions black female bodies.