Issues of gender have long been an important topic in Third World literature, and, at the intersection of postcolonial and feminist theory, a substantial body of critical texts now exists on literary representations of the subjectivity of postcolonial women. These representations may be fictional or autobiographical, and in any case the difference between the two genres is minimized: the novels are often based closely on the real-life experiences of their authors, and they also often adopt the textual conventions of the autobiography or journal intime. Betty Wilson, referring to French Caribbean women's novels, comments that ‘the structure of the fictional autobiography, journal, diary, letter or other relatively ‘‘intimate’’ genres seems to be the preferred vehicle for expressing feminine/feminist/female consciousness’. The fact that both the authors and the protagonists of these novels are female in itself encourages critics to assume some kind of biographical continuity between the two – what Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido in their introduction to Out of the Kumbla call ‘a doubled female voice of woman-poet-author and woman-speaking-subject’ (p. 5).

The specifically female voice is in fact a central concept of this critical discourse; the concern is with (de)colonized women as silenced subjects finding a voice, being ‘authorized’ to ‘speak’. The theorization of subjectivity in autobiography is underpinned by the notion of ‘coming to voice’, as Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson point out in their introduction to Women, Autobiography, Theory: ‘Attention to ‘‘the colonized subject’’ and to what has been termed marginal or minoritized discourse has spurred rethinking of the paradigms of subjectivity. And a central site in that revisionary struggle has been autobiographical discourse, the coming to voice of previously silenced subjects’ (p. 27). But it is equally prominent in the analysis of fictional texts, as for instance in the opening sentences of the introduction to Out of the Kumbla:

However, ‘Out of this voicelessness and silence, contemporary Caribbean women writers are beginning some bold steps to creative expression’ (p. 2).