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Michelle Cliff
Michelle Carla Cliff (2 November 1946 – 12 June 2016) was a Jamaican-American author whose notable works included Abeng (1985), No Telephone to Heaven (1987), and Free Enterprise (1993).
In addition to novels, Cliff also wrote short stories, prose poems, and literary criticism. Her works explore the identity problems that stem from postcolonialism, race and gender constructs. A historical revisionist, many of Cliff's works seek to advance an alternative view of history against established mainstream narratives. Cliff identified as biracial and bisexual, and had both Jamaican and American citizenship. Her writings focused often on Caribbean identity.
Cliff was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1946 and moved with her family to New York City three years later. Cliff has described her family as "Jamaica white", Jamaicans of mostly European ancestry, but later began to identify as a light-skinned Black woman. Responding to a description of her in the anthology Her True-True Name which called her light-skinned enough to be functionally white, Cliff rejected the notion that she has "a white outlook just because [she] look[s] white." She moved back to Jamaica in 1956 and attended St Andrew High School, where she began writing, before returning to New York City in 1960. She was educated at Wagner College where she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in European history, then at the Warburg Institute of the University of London where she did postgraduate work in Renaissance studies, focusing on the Italian Renaissance.
Cliff later lived in Santa Cruz, California, with her partner, the poet Adrienne Rich. The two had been together since 1976; Rich died in 2012.
Cliff died of liver failure on 12 June 2016.
Cliff's first published work was the book Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise, which covered the ways she experienced racism and prejudice. In 1981, Cliff became an associate of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press.[citation needed]
She was a contributor to the 1983 Black feminist anthology Home Girls.
In 1984, Cliff published Abeng, a semi-autobiographical novel that explores topics of female sexual subjectivity and Jamaican identity. Next was The Land of Look Behind: Prose and Poetry (1985), which uses the Jamaican folk world, its landscape and culture to examine identity.
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Michelle Cliff
Michelle Carla Cliff (2 November 1946 – 12 June 2016) was a Jamaican-American author whose notable works included Abeng (1985), No Telephone to Heaven (1987), and Free Enterprise (1993).
In addition to novels, Cliff also wrote short stories, prose poems, and literary criticism. Her works explore the identity problems that stem from postcolonialism, race and gender constructs. A historical revisionist, many of Cliff's works seek to advance an alternative view of history against established mainstream narratives. Cliff identified as biracial and bisexual, and had both Jamaican and American citizenship. Her writings focused often on Caribbean identity.
Cliff was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1946 and moved with her family to New York City three years later. Cliff has described her family as "Jamaica white", Jamaicans of mostly European ancestry, but later began to identify as a light-skinned Black woman. Responding to a description of her in the anthology Her True-True Name which called her light-skinned enough to be functionally white, Cliff rejected the notion that she has "a white outlook just because [she] look[s] white." She moved back to Jamaica in 1956 and attended St Andrew High School, where she began writing, before returning to New York City in 1960. She was educated at Wagner College where she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in European history, then at the Warburg Institute of the University of London where she did postgraduate work in Renaissance studies, focusing on the Italian Renaissance.
Cliff later lived in Santa Cruz, California, with her partner, the poet Adrienne Rich. The two had been together since 1976; Rich died in 2012.
Cliff died of liver failure on 12 June 2016.
Cliff's first published work was the book Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise, which covered the ways she experienced racism and prejudice. In 1981, Cliff became an associate of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press.[citation needed]
She was a contributor to the 1983 Black feminist anthology Home Girls.
In 1984, Cliff published Abeng, a semi-autobiographical novel that explores topics of female sexual subjectivity and Jamaican identity. Next was The Land of Look Behind: Prose and Poetry (1985), which uses the Jamaican folk world, its landscape and culture to examine identity.