Grotesque Touch

“Amy King provides us with excellent analysis of a fascinating range of literary and visual texts. Few scholars of the circum-Caribbean engage with both the literary and the visual with as much rigor and facility as King does here, and her work is crucial for understanding the contemporary United States and Caribbean.” — Raphael Dalleo, author of American Imperialism’s Undead: The Occupation and the Rise of Caribbean Anticolonialism

“As no prior book has quite accomplished, Grotesque Touch forces readers to recognize the normalization and performativity of women’s violence in spite of orientations toward the feminine that would frame such violence as inherently aberrant or monstrous, and it underscores how violence between women is deeply entrenched in plantation structures of power.” — Keith Cartwright, University of North Florida

“Grotesque Touch offer[s] a window into the exceptional and eye opening critique of violence among women . . . King takes seriously her subject matter and reads it richly across archives that might otherwise be siloed from one another.”—American Literary History

“A deeply researched, historically contextualized, and effectively argued work that takes seriously women’s violence in a range of texts—fictional, visual, and audiovisual.”—Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature