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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Caribbean literature|Literature|Comparative literature'
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1
Canfield, Robert Alan 1964. "Renaming the rituals: Theatralizations of the Caribbean in the 1980s." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/282638.
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Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins, in their recently published Postcolonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics, highlight the significance of metatheatrical tendencies in the resistance drama of Anglophone arenas of decolonization, particularly those of the Anglophone Caribbean. Insisting on such metatheater as more than simply postmodern play, Gilbert and Tompkins crucially note the emergence of a critically conscious theater that explores and explodes notions of subjectivity, ideologies of difference and monologies of mastery. My studies in postcolonial drama and theory have led me toward similar sites and modes of struggle, culminating in a project that focuses upon this act of metatheater in the Caribbean and seeks to interpret its socio-ideological/cultural implications in light of recent postcolonial, feminist, discursive critique. Generated out of nationalist Theaters of Dissimulation that enact an unmasking of the discourses of race and mastery so crucial to the dissemblances of colonial master-scripts, I argue that Caribbean theater in the West Indies, Puerto Rico, and the Antilles translates these early nationalist revolutions into an involutionary act, one that avoids the reinscription of patriarchal, racialist, essentializing notions of identity and attempts instead to deconstruct what Stuart Hall has termed the "politics of representation." Through this spotlighting of image and image systems rather than identity politics, 80s playwrights make Edouard Glissant's concept of theatralization--the very act of cultural ontology--the main actor on the stage, creating a Theater of Dissimilation that, like Kamau Brathwaite's idea of "nation language," represents a cultural process of critical creolization.
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Lagapa, Jason S. "Inarticulate prayers: Irony and religion in late twentieth-century poetry." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/280295.
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Inarticulate Prayers: Irony and Religion in Late Twentieth-Century Poetry examines irony and its implications for religious belief within texts ranging from the New York School Poets to the Language Poets and, in Caribbean literature, within the poems of Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite. Taking Jacques Derrida's distinction between deconstruction and negative theology as a point of departure, I argue that contemporary poets employ ironic language to articulate an ambivalent, and skeptical, system of belief. In "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials," Derrida contrasts his theory of differance--as a fundamentally negative and critical mode of inquiry--with negative theology, which ultimately affirms God's being after a process of negation. My study asserts that contemporary poets, in accord with principles of negative theology, engage in inarticulate, self-canceling and negative utterances that nevertheless affirm the possibility of belief and enlightenment. By postulating the affinity between contemporary poets and the apophatic tradition, I explain how the work of these poets, despite often being dismissed as arid exercises in poststructuralist thought, productively draws on linguistic theories and also advances beyond the "negativity" of such theories. Moreover, as it intervenes in recent debates over the absence of a spiritual dimension to contemporary poetry, my dissertation opens new perspectives through which to theorize postmodern literature. Demonstrating that experiments in language and form are driven by an ironic stance towards belief, authorship and literary tradition, Inarticulate Prayers ultimately redefines contemporary lyric and narrative poetry and asserts negation, inarticulateness, and contradiction as determining characteristics of postmodern writing.
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Higgins, MaryEllen. "Questions of apprenticeship in African and Caribbean narratives gender, journey, and development /." Access restricted to users with UT Austin EID Full text (PDF) from UMI/Dissertation Abstracts International, 2001. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/fullcit?p3034547.
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Alston, Vermonja Romona. "Race-crossings at the crossroads of African American travel in the Caribbean." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/280506.
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Traversing geographical borders frequently allows people the illusion of crossing social, political, and economic boundaries. For African-Americans of the early twentieth century, crossing physical borders offered the promise of freedom from racial segregation and discrimination in all aspects of social, political, and cultural life. Haiti became a site for African-American imaginings of a free and just society beyond the problem of the color line. From the 1920's through the 1980's, African-American travel writing was strategically deployed in efforts to transform a U.S. society characterized by Jim Crow segregation. In the process, Haiti and the rest of the Caribbean were romanticized as spaces of racial equality and political freedom. This project examines the ways in which the Caribbean has been packaged by and for African-Americans, of both U.S. and Caribbean ancestry, as a place to re-engage with romanticized African origins. In the selling of the Caribbean, cultural/heritage tourism, romance/sex tourism and ecotourism all trade on the same metaphors of loss and redemption of the innocence, equality, and purity found in a state of nature. Through analyses of standard commercial tourism advertising alongside of travel writing, I argue that with the growth of the black middle-class in the late 1980's crossings to the Caribbean have become romantic engagements with an idealized pastoral past believed lost in the transition to middle-class prosperity in the United States. African-American travel writers, writing about the Caribbean, tend to create a monolithic community of cultural belonging despite differences of geography and class, and gender hierarchies. Thus, African-American travelers' tales constitute narratives at the crossroads of celebrations of their economic progress in the United States and nostalgia for a racial community believed lost on the road to suburban prosperity. For them, the Caribbean stands in as the geographical metaphor for that idealized lost community.
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Eidlin, Barry. "Crossed Wires, Noisy Signals: Language, Identity, and Resistance in Caribbean Literature." Oberlin College Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 1996. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin1323646674.
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Carr, Rachel McKenzie. "But What Has Helga Crane to Do with the West Indies? Plantation Afterlives in the Black Atlantic." UKnowledge, 2019. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/102.
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“But What Has Helga Crane to Do with the West Indies? Plantation Afterlives in the Black Atlantic” situates the emergence of the southern gothic in modernist American and Caribbean works as a response to the shifting cultural narrative of the plantation in the twentieth century. In this project, I argue that the plantation seeps out of its place and time to haunt landscapes it may never have touched and times in which slavery is long over. While the plantation system is broadly recognized as a literary, political, and cultural force in nineteenth-century literary studies, I conceive it is also a driving force of southern literature even after the physical plantations begin to fade.
In this project, I examine how literary portrayals of plantations flourish in the 1920s and 30s, from the writings of the Nashville Agrarians to the popularity of Gone with the Wind, arguing that this period represents a literary re-mythologizing of the plantation’s legacy as a benevolent and positive model for the south. A significant contribution of this dissertation is then in demonstrating how plantations are present in works that are not traditionally understood as plantation fiction, and that these works offer a resistance to this re-mythologizing through turning to the gothic: the transatlantic plantation gothic in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Jean Rhys’ Voyage in the Dark, the impact of environmental labor on the plantation gothic in Jean Toomer’s Cane and Eric Walrond’s Tropic Death, and finally, how plantation modernity affects portrayals of natural disasters in plantation territories in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!. Ultimately, this project contributes to the discussion of plantation modernity currently occurring in Southern Studies beyond the nineteenth century and into the modernist period, while also demonstrating how movements often construed as disparate in American literary studies, like the Harlem Renaissance and the Nashville Agrarians, were actually in close conversation.
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O'Connell, Grainne Marie Teresa. "A comparative analysis of HIV/AIDS, transnationalism, sexuality, gender and ethnicity in selected Anglophone Caribbean and South African literature and film." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2014. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/48857/.
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In this thesis, I demonstrate that the historical, and ideological, trajectories of HIV/AIDS discourses mirror the tensions between the local, global and transnational in my analysis of selected Anglophone Caribbean and South African literature and film. My methodology is adamantly a comparative studies approach as I overview the broader socio-historical narrative of HIV/AIDS whilst concurrently incorporating the idea of texts as always inflected by the wider historical and ideological processes behind transnationalism. I then link the competing histories of HIV/AIDS with textual depictions of HIV/AIDS, Indo-Caribbean histories, black Atlantic histories, and same-sex desire whilst foregrounding the socio-historical backdrop of transnationalism since the colonial period. A central thread running throughout is that transnational dialectics signify both the effects of the past on the present and the importance of comparative analyses for transnational textual engagements. Texts under discussion are the feature film Dancehall Queen by Rick Elgood and Don Letts, the novel The Swinging Bridge by Ramabai Espinet, the documentary film The Darker Side of Black by Isaac Julien, the feature film Children of God by Kareem Mortimer, the novella Welcome to Our Hillbrow by Phaswane Mpe, and the feature film The World Unseen by Shamim Sarif. Given the concurrent focus in postcolonial/queer around specific regional histories, I pinpoint that the dialectics between local, global and transnational discourses convey more nuanced, yet also more contradictory, textual engagement(s) with HIV/AIDS, transnationalism, sexuality, gender and ethnicity than some of the dominant narrative threads and debates surrounding postcolonial/queer. This point is particularly stressed in light of how many postcolonial/queer discussions readily fix the idea of the local as distinct from the global and the transnational. I thus re-read the contradictory registers of these discourses whilst foregrounding the relationship between these and HIV/AIDS discourses since the 1970s. I concurrently situate ny transnational comparative approach within the broader field of postcolonial/queer theory and approaches.
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Smith, Logan A. "MONUMENTS IN THE MAKING: CAPTURING TRAUMA(S) OF COMMUNAL ABSENCE IN THE POST-PLANTATION FICTION OF MARYSE CONDÉ AND WILLIAM FAULKNER." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1533330599127457.
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Gonzalez, Christopher Thomas. "Hospitable Imaginations: Contemporary Latino/a Literature and the Pursuit of a Readership." The Ohio State University, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1343808330.
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Pérez-Padilla, Rita M. "De pura cepa: Seis cuentos de Puerto Rico, 1548–2017." Oberlin College Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin1526397339724881.
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Fernández, Morbila. "En el Vórtice cel Huracán. Reescrituras Oblicuas del Caribe Hispano en los Discursos Literarios de Virgilio Piñera y Aída Cartagena Portalatín." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/195780.
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An oblique reading of the European canon constitutes the discursive center for present day Caribbean literature. In doing this, authors question Eurocentric representational codes of Caribbean identity while they create their own discourses in "a certain way", that is, from a certain perspective and by means of hybrid appropriation and synchretization of the very models that feed their imagination. As this analysis purports to show, writers Virgilio Piñera (Cuba) and Aída Cartagena Portalatín (Dominican Republic), by their rereading of the canon, establish in their works hybrid dialogs between the European There and the Caribbean Here. In that line, among the canonical cultural signifiers that the authors adopt, they privilege the appropriation of Greek myths. Piñera does this in his theater piece Electra Garrigó, and Cartagena in her novel Escalera para Electra. In Piñera's work, the main devices utilized are humor, irony, and parody of the text by Euripides, obtained by the used of "choteo", a particular brand of Cuban parodic humor in the manner of Bakhtin's carnavalization. This technique is employed along with the use of heteroglossia, which is utilized by Cartagena as well in her novel. In her work, the Dominican author constructs a parallel and intertextual reading of the same play by the Greek dramatist from the positionality of a female subject. Although with different strategies and in different literary genres, Piñera and Cartagena structure their literary discourses with themes that reflect their cultural identities from the synchretism of difference and from the perspective of a Caribbean subject. This dissertation confirms the efficacy of the discursive strategies they utilize on taking the female subject and the family as the axis of their contesting, unofficial readings of the history and cultural identity of the Caribbean.
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Samson, Chantal. "Translation into english of Marie-Célie Agnant's "Vingt petits pas vers Maria" and "Le Noël de Maïté" accompagnied by a study of the author, her oeuvre and her place in Canadian literature." Mémoire, Université de Sherbrooke, 2011. http://savoirs.usherbrooke.ca/handle/11143/2668.
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Abstract : This thesis is divided into two parts: the first part provides an introduction to my translations from French into English of two children's books by Haitian-Canadian writer Marie-Célie Agnant: Vingt petits pas vers Maria, a short story about domestic workers living in Montréal, and Le Noël de Maïté, a story about a girl spending Christmas in Canada with her Haitian grandmother. I give a short overview of Marie-Célie Agnant, her literary oeuvre, and her reception in Canada. I discuss the Haitian diaspora, especially within the Canadian context. I include an overview of some writers, men and women, from Haiti who have produced migrant writing. I then describe the place of minority writing in Canada and draw parallels between Agnant and Dionne Brand, Makeda Silvera and Althea Prince, English-language writers in Caribbean-Canadian literature who address Black women's realities in Canada. Like these women, Agnant writes to fight the silence that is imposed by racism and sexism. The introductory essay concludes with comments on my translation process and examples of my translation strategies. The second part of this thesis consists of my two translations, Twenty Tiny Steps Towards Maria and Maïté's Christmas . These are the first of Agnant's young adult books to be translated into English. Also included in this section are my translations of the appendices of these two books, which include notes, questions, games, interviews and recipes designed to make the books more interactive for children and teach them about Haiti and the life of immigrants in Canada||Résumé : Ce mémoire de maîtrise se divise en deux parties. La première partie est une introduction à mes traductions vers l'anglais de deux livres de jeunesse de l'auteur québécoise d'origine haïtienne, Marie-Célie Agnant, Vingt petits pas vers Maria, l'histoire d'immigrantes domestiques vivant à Montréal, et Le Noël de Maïté, l'histoire d'une fille qui passe Noël au Canada avec sa grand-mère haïtienne. Je donne une courte biographie de Marie-Célie Agnant, en décrivant son oeuvre littéraire et sa réception au Canada. Je fais un bilan de la diaspora haïtienne avec une attention surtout à la situation du Canada. J'inclus un survol d'auteurs haïtiens, hommes et femmes, qui ont publié de la littérature migrante au Canada. Ensuite, je décris la place de l'écriture minoritaire au Canada et j'indique des parallèles entre Agnant et certaines écrivaines canadiennes d'origine antillaise qui écrivent en anglais, dont Dionne Brand, Makeda Silvera et Althea Prince, qui se sont penchées sur la situation de la femme noire au Canada. Comme ces femmes, Agnant écrit pour combattre le silence imposé par le racisme et le sexisme. Je termine cette partie avec des commentaires sur mon processus de traduction et mes stratégies de traduction, prenant des exemples de mes traductions. La deuxième partie présente mes traductions, Twenty Tiny Steps Towards Maria et Maïté's Christmas. Ceux-ci sont les premières traductions en anglais des livres de jeunesse d'Agnant. On trouve aussi dans cette section ma traduction des annexes des deux livres, qui contiennent des notes, des questions, des jeux, des entrevues et des recettes, qui ont I'objectif de faire une activité interactive de la lecture de ces livres et d'apprendre aux jeunes lecteurs davantage sur la vie en Haïti et la situation des immigrants au Canada.
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Soric, Kristina Maria. "Empires of Fiction: Coloniality in the Literatures of the Nineteenth-Century Iberian Empires after the Age of Atlantic Revolutions." The Ohio State University, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1502913220147523.
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Graßl, Franziska [Verfasser], and Helge [Akademischer Betreuer] Nowak. ""Gewoon een Land Zijn" : psycho-postcolonial perspectives on national identity and belonging in Guyana and Suriname: a comparative reading of Anglophone and Dutch Caribbean literature / Franziska Graßl ; Betreuer: Helge Nowak." München : Universitätsbibliothek der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, 2016. http://d-nb.info/1131040465/34.
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Graßl, Franziska Verfasser], and Helge [Akademischer Betreuer] [Nowak. ""Gewoon een Land Zijn" : psycho-postcolonial perspectives on national identity and belonging in Guyana and Suriname: a comparative reading of Anglophone and Dutch Caribbean literature / Franziska Graßl ; Betreuer: Helge Nowak." München : Universitätsbibliothek der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, 2016. http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:19-206845.
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Kerby, Erik R. "Negotiating Identity in the Transnational Imaginary of Julia Alvarez's and Edwidge Danticat's Literature." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2008. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/1402.
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The increased contact between nations and cultures in the globalization of the twenty-first century requires an increased accountability for the ways in which individuals and countries negotiate these points of contact. New World and Caribbean Studies envision the cross-cultural and transnational encounters between indigenous, European, and African peoples as important contributors to a paradigm within which identity in relation offers an alternative to identities rooted in national and filial frameworks. Such frameworks limit the ability to construct identity without relying upon static representations of history, culture, and ethnicity that tend to privilege one group over another. In the literature of Edwidge Danticat and Julia Alvarez, however, a fictional space is created that rewrites national histories and problematizes rooted identities through their novels' characterization. This fictional space is a transnational paradigm that—in the vocabulary of the critical theories of Édouard Glissant, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, and David A. Hollinger—explores the effects of cultures founded on ideas of relation and affiliation rather than on rooted socio-cultural legitimacy and ethno-political authority. Danticat and Alvarez's characters engage in a process of present living that allows them to negotiate their experience of diaspora and maintain a stable construction of identity in relation.
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Meyers, Emily Taylor 1979. "Transnational romance: The politics of desire in Caribbean novels by women." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/10232.
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xi, 236 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.<br>Writers in the Caribbean, like writers throughout the postcolonial world, return to colonial texts to rewrite the myths that justified and maintained colonial control. Exemplary of a widespread, regional phenomenon that begins at mid-century, writers such as Aimé Césaire and George Lamming take up certain texts such as Shakespeare's The Tempest and recast them in their own image. Postcolonial literary theory reads this act of rewriting the canon as a political one that speaks back to power and often advocates for political and cultural independence. Towards the end of the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Caribbean women writers begin a new wave of rewriting that continues in this tradition, but with certain differences, not least of which is a focused attention to gender and sexuality and to the literary legacies of romance. In the dissertation I consider a number of novels from throughout the region that rewrite the romance, including Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Maryse Condé's La migration des coeurs (1995), Mayra Santos-Febres's Nuestra señora de la noche (2006), and Dionne Brand's In Another Place, Not Here (1996). Romance, perhaps more than any other literary form, exerts an allegorical force that exceeds the story of individual characters. The symbolic weight of romance imagines the possibilities of a social order--a social order dependent on the sexual behavior of its citizens. By rewriting the romance, Caribbean women reconsider the sexual politics that have linked women with metaphorical constructions of the nation while at the same time detailing the extent to which transnational forces, including colonization, impact the representation of love and desire in literary texts. Although ultimately these novels refuse the generic requirements of the traditional resolution for romance (the so-called happy ending), they nonetheless gesture towards a reordering of community and a revised notion of kinship that recognizes the weight of both gendered and sexual identities in the Caribbean.<br>Committee in charge: Karen McPherson, Chairperson, Romance Languages;
David Vazquez, Member, English;
Tania Triana, Member, Romance Languages;
Judith Raiskin, Outside Member, Womens and Gender Studies
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Istomina, Julia. "Property, Mobility, and Epistemology in U.S. Women of Color Detective Fiction." The Ohio State University, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1429191876.
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Linares, Trinidad. "Dis-Orienting Interactions: Agatha Christie, Imperial Tourists, and the Other." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1522953353192611.
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Okagbue, Osy A. "Aspects of African and Caribbean theatre : a comparative study." Thesis, University of Leeds, 1990. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.249811.
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Cartaya, Jorge E. "Listening/Reading for Disremembered Voices: Additive Archival Representation and the Zong Massacre of 1781." FIU Digital Commons, 2017. http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/3187.
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This thesis grapples with questions surrounding representation, mourning, and responsibility in relation to two literary representations of the ZONG massacre of 1781. These texts are M. NourbeSe Philip’s ZONG! and Fred D’Aguiar’s FEEDING THE GHOSTS. The only extant archival document—a record of the insurance dispute which ensued as a consequence of the massacre—does not represent the drowned as victims, nor can it represent the magnitude of the atrocity. As such, this thesis posits that the archival gaps or silences from which the captives’ voices are missing become spaces of possibility for additive representation. This thesis also examines the role voice and sound play in these literary texts and the deconstructive-ethical philosophies of Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida. This thesis argues that these texts invoke the sonic materiality of voice in the service of responding to the disremembered dead through mourning and acknowledgment.
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Borilot, Vanessa. "Feminine strategies of resistance comparative study of two XIXth century French literary pieces and two XXth century French Caribbean writings /." Access to citation, abstract and download form provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company; downloadable PDF file, 111 p, 2009. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1885467531&sid=2&Fmt=2&clientId=8331&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Powell-Bennett, Claudette. "The Influence of Culture on Conflict Management Styles and Willingness to Use Mediation| A Comparative Study of African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans (Jamaicans) in South Florida." Thesis, Nova Southeastern University, 2018. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10623422.
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<p> Conflict management style preference and use of mediation within the Black population in the United States (US) is not well understood. The purpose of this study is to find out if there is a significant difference in conflict management style preference and use of mediation by African Americans and Afro-Caribbean (Jamaicans) living in the United States. Based on Hofstede's theory of individualism-collectivism cultural orientation, the US culture emphasizes individualism while Jamaica’s culture emphasizes collectivism. Responses were collected from 108 African American and Jamaican respondents anonymously, of which 96 were deemed usable. The Rahim (1983) Organizational Conflict Management Style Inventory was used to collect data on the five styles and was analyzed with the appropriate statistic test. A thematic analysis was used to analyze the text-based data gathered from the two open-ended questions at the end of the survey. The thematic analysis revealed two major themes: personal and workplace relationship conflict situations. It is recommended that future study includes three groups of Blacks instead of two groups. The preferred conflict management style from the combined group result is the compromising style. A significant difference was found in the obliging and compromising conflict management styles between African Americans and Jamaicans. No significant difference was found between the groups’ conflict management style and willingness to use mediation. The open-ended questions and individual textual description of conflict experience and willingness to use mediation were used to clarify the quantitative results and provide a better understanding of the similarities and differences among people of African descent from different cultural orientations.</p><p>
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Lin, Tzu Yu. "Detoured, deferred and different : a comparative study of postcolonial diasporic identities in the literary works of Sam Selvon and Weng Nao." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/10582.
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This thesis provides a comparative reading to selected writings from Anglophone Trinidadian writer Sam Selvon and Japanophone Taiwanese writer Weng Nao, demonstrating the link between these two authors’ specific representation of multiple diasporic models of Caribbean diaspora and Taiwanese diaspora respectively and its influence on diasporic identity narratives. This study provides a cross-linguistic/ cultural perspective on comparative postcolonial literary studies, which helps to move beyond the primary focus of Anglophone texts and contexts. Although the focused two authors Sam Selvon and Weng Nao come from different historical specificities and linguistic backgrounds that urge them produce their narratives in different ways and tones of tackling issues that they have encountered in each socio-political and cultural contexts respectively, their works provides outstanding examples of how contemporary diasporic routes—both geographically and metaphorically, have significant influence on literary productions that should not be categorised by its geographical or linguistic boundaries, and can only be fully understood by linking one to another from the legacies of colonialism and the triangle models of diasporic routes. The diasporic identity, as being illustrated in both of their works, has been evolved with geographical movements and transformed into an iconic concept that makes new forms of artistic production possible. Diasporic literature, therefore, should not be limited into traditional disciplinary compartmentalisation of national literary studies. By bringing the focus on the multiple diasporic journeys, the identity representation reflected in the literary work in this study helps to identify the complexity and boundary crossing within Anglophone literature and Japanophone literature, which have already transformed into literary works of being able to depict a more complex model of modern cultures—endless traveling and hybrid. By bringing forth the excluded Japanophone texts in the field of postcolonial studies to be compared with the texts from the prominent Anglophone postcolonial writer Sam Selvon, this thesis hopes to offer some insights into the reassessment of the literary status of Weng Nao and the significance of his works in the world literary stage, and, furthermore, to identify how Japanophone literary works might be compatible with postcolonial analysis.
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Elazar-Demota, Yehonatan. "An Ethnography: Discovering the Hidden Identity of the Banilejos." FIU Digital Commons, 2016. http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/2441.
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During June of 2015, an anthropological and sociological study was conducted in the Dominican city of Bani. On the surface, the banilejo people appear to be devout Catholics. However, having had access to their personal lives, it was evident that their peculiar family traditions and folklore hinted at their liminal identities. This study involved interviewing 23 female subjects with questions found in the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitorial manuals. In addition, their mitochondrial DNA sequences were analyzed and demonstrated a high percentage of consanguinity and inbreeding within Bani's population. The genetic analysis of their mitochondrial DNA yielded genetic links with Jewish women from worldwide Jewish communities. Victor Turner's communitas theory and Geertz's thick description were used as the methodology. Ultimately, the sociological and anthropological analysis of their way of life evidenced how their ancestors preserved Jewish identity covertly throughout the inquisition time period (1481-1834) and how they continue to perpetuate it in contemporary times through consanguinity, and the power of superstition and taboo.
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Sankara, Edgard Wendimpousdé. "Francophone African and Caribbean autobiographies a comparative study /." 2002. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/fullcit?p3108503.
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Heady, Margaret Loren. "From marvelous to magic realism: Modernist and postmodernist discourses of identity in the Caribbean novel." 1997. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9737535.
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Caribbean authors, due to the unique geographical, social and historical contexts of their work, have long been preoccupied with the notion of authenticity. Yet the project of uncovering or inventing an "authentic" Caribbean discourse has repeatedly confronted difficulties resulting from the intrinsic hybridity and dynamism of the region. In particular, discourses of origin and belonging based on national boundaries or ethnic essentialism have proven inadequate for rendering the "essence" of the Caribbean experience. This problem has been exacerbated by the fact that such discourses are generally dependent on European literary forms to be their vehicle. For each of the three novelists studied in this dissertation, the discourse of the marvelous seemed to offer a path for creating a fictional identity quest which would be able to capture something of this unique but elusive Caribbean "essence". The dissertation argues that by tracing the transcultural route taken by Marvelous Realism and later Magic Realism through three novels by Jacques Stephen Alexis of Haiti, Alejo Carpentier of Cuba, and Simone Schwarz-Bart of Guadeloupe, one becomes aware of an evolution in the use of the marvelous which reflects different approaches to the dilemma faced by the Caribbean artist coping with the seemingly contradictory demands of a Parisian intellectual formation and an authentic "Caribbean" sensibility. This evolution reveals an emerging "postmodernist" consciousness in the quest for an authentic Caribbean discourse, suggesting a growing acceptance on the part of Caribbean writers of the hybrid nature of their intellectual and cultural heritage. Using analysis based on writings by Antonio Gramsci, Edouard Glissant, Gayatri Spivak, Regine Robin, Stephen Slemon and Paul Gilroy among others, the dissertation explores the ways in which these three novelists, poised uneasily between two continents, have through their fiction and essays struggled and/or come to terms with the "decentered" positionality which seems to be so "central" to the Caribbean experience.
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McKenzie, Ada Chinara. "Creolization, possession, and performances in Caribbean cultural discourses." 2007. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI3275781.
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“Creolization, Possession, and Performances in Caribbean Cultural Discourses” entails an intercultural, interdisciplinary investigation of the motifs of spiritual and bodily possession in historic and contemporary discourses of Caribbean cultures. Through a multifaceted analysis of literary, visual, oral, and performative texts, I emphasize the manner in which the historically-rooted tensions of possession invite a more complex understanding of the dynamics of creolization—or the amalgamation of racial, ethnic, and religious identities—in the Caribbean. The conflicts engendered by spiritual and bodily possession connote the crossroads, or the metaphorical site of racial, cultural, linguistic, and religious interchange analogous to the post-Columbian Caribbean region. In my analyses I problematize the discourses of creolization by highlighting the tensions and resistance that are deeply embedded in the crossroads, and which are most prominently revealed through the motifs of spiritual and bodily possession. ^ The introductory chapter provides an overview of post-Columbian Caribbean histories and Caribbean cultural discourses. Chapter 1 examines the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre, Patroness Saint of Cuba, and the orisha Ochún, the Afro-Cuban deity syncretized with the Virgin of Charity in Cuban history and folklore. Chapter 2 continues the investigation of racialized, gendered archetypes of femininity in Cuban culture with an emphasis on visual religious culture and the aesthetics of feminine sweetness in Cuba and Puerto Rico. Chapter 3 analyzes spiritual possession as a pathway to health and transcendence, with an emphasis on several novels by Cuban-born writer Mayra Montero, whose early literature invokes the Haitian religious experience. In Chapter 4 I ponder the prevalence of haunting feminine figures in Caribbean literatures and folklores while drawing attention to Franco-Caribbean cultural discourses. Chapter 5 examines maternality in contemporary literatures by Afro-Caribbean women, and the discourses of the heroic male Caribbean maroon that frequently disavow the heroism of Afro-Caribbean mothers. In Chapter 6 I consider globalization, diasporas, and Caribbean nationalisms while focusing on Trinidad Carnival as a performative spectacle that paradigmatically dramatizes the racial, cultural, and gendered tensions of Caribbean creolization. The concluding chapter offers some insights on the directions in which Caribbean cultural studies and cultural praxis may develop in the future. ^
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Akbari, Shahmirzadi Atefeh. "Disorderly Political Imaginations: Comparative Readings of Iranian and Caribbean Fiction and Poetry, 1960s-1980s." Thesis, 2019. https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-wqbh-te04.
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The advent of Area Studies and Comparative Literature in US academia developed in response to (or, more aptly, as a result of) the Cold War in the 1960s, with locations such as the Middle East relegated to Area Studies due to the strategic importance that knowledge of its histories, cultures, and languages had for global (read: US) geopolitics. On the other hand, the discipline of Comparative Literature constituted the expansion of US literary studies due to the influx of European intellectual refugees, with scholars and practitioners formulating the field around texts in, primarily, German and Romance languages in conversation with Anglophone texts. Over the past two decades, this Eurocentric model of Comparative Literature has been challenged, and, to some extent, subverted. Yet more often than not, modern Persian Literature is consigned to the realm of Area Studies in general and a Middle Eastern discourse in particular.
My dissertation, “Disorderly Political Imaginations: Comparative Readings of Iranian and Caribbean Fiction and Poetry, 1960s-1980s,” addresses this gap by placing Iran and Persian literature front and center of a comparative project that includes canonical writers from the anglophone and francophone Caribbean. Additionally, “Disorderly Political Imaginations” considers intellectual figures and their literary productions that contributed to the liberation of individual and social consciousness. These figures created unique forms and languages of revolt that deviated from the prevailing definitions of committed, political, or national literature. In The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, Vijay Prashad sets a precedent for comparing Iran and the Caribbean in his chapter titled “Tehran,” by connecting Gharbzadegi (Westoxification or Occidentosis)—the cultural and socio-political manifesto of Jalal Al-e Ahmad—and Aimé Césaire’s négritude. On a broader, geopolitical level, he concomitantly connects imperial schemes in the “nominally independent” Iran and Caribbean region, along with the forms of resistance to them. Yet, for a chapter titled “Tehran,” the focus is mostly the contribution of other Third World projects to that of Iran’s.
Conversely, “Disorderly Political Imaginations” centers Iran as a comparable case meriting comprehensive analysis in Third World cultural and political projects. Furthermore, rather than study the works of Al-e Ahmad and Césaire as exemplary cultural projects of resistance, I choose to investigate alternative modes of political thought and writing that move beyond the framework of “resistance”—modes that are not always considered as contributing to the political landscape. The “disorderly” politics and the “disorderly” creations of the writers under study thus take to task the idea of political literature during the decades of global decolonization, motivated by Jean Paul Sartre’s littérature engagée (engaged literature).
In three chapters, I study Iranian literature of the mid to late 1960s in comparison to African diasporic literature from the Caribbean of the late 1970s to mid 1980s. The oft-overlooked issue of gender in national liberation projects of the time is addressed in my first chapter, “Scarecrows and Whores: Women in Savashoun and Hérémakhonon,” as I compare the two novels by Simin Daneshvar and Maryse Condé. The multilingual female protagonists in the novels of Condé and Daneshvar act as both literal and cultural interpreters and intermediaries in the narratives. I then extend my analysis of these protagonists’ precarious positions to the equally precarious intellectual positions of their creators in political discourses. By using Condé’s delineation of disorder in “Order, Disorder, Freedom and the West Indian Writer” as a necessary marker for freedom in both thought and creativity, central arguments of my dissertation about disorderly political imaginations are also presented.
In “Disrupted and Disruptive Genealogies in the Novels of Hushang Golshiri and Édouard Glissant,” I compare Golshiri’s Shazdeh Ehtejab (Prince Ehtejab) and Éduoard Glissant’s La case du commandeur (The Overseer’s Cabin). Building upon Michél Foucault’s concept of “subjugated knowledges,” I demonstrate how their protagonists’ insistence on finding answers to the political questions of the present in the historical past (of empire and slavery respectively) leads to their insanity, and how, concomitantly, the formal characteristics of these narratives (such as their in-betweenness in terms of genre, language, and mode of address) offer “noncoercive knowledge” (to use Edward Said’s phrasing from The World, the Text, and the Critic) in lieu of answers. While taking into consideration the world literary traditions these novelists are engaging with, my analysis moves beyond a poststructuralist critique; instead, I privilege these writers’ own historical, socio-political, and cultural contexts in literary analysis, both distinctively and in comparison with one another.
In “Poet-Travelers: The Poetic Geographies of Sohrab Sepehri and Derek Walcott,” I analyze how they both create a poetic language of revolt and liberation that, while affirming multiple literary and linguistic traditions, cannot be dismissed as derivative or unoriginal. In this comparative reading, I study their particular use of enjambments and anaphora, the combination of an autobiographical, monologic poetic voice with that of dramatic dialogues, a plethora of travel imagery and vocabulary that reflect the poets’ own multitudinous travels, the disparate religious, mythic, and folkloric traditions they draw from, and ultimately, the unique languages they create.
In comparing these texts, I consider the different and particular historical moments they were written in, which is a revolutionary moment for Iran, and for the Caribbean texts is a postcolonial moment. The political nuances of these different contexts thus effect the timbre of the texts, and these divergences in articulation are analyzed as well. “Disorderly Political Imaginations” thus does not create a homogenizing, globalized study of literary texts. In that same vein, my research demonstrates the valence that incorporating neglected subjects (in this case, Persian language and literary studies) into Comparative Literature can have in understanding the hegemonic structures of power at play in knowledge production, both locally and globally.
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Braziel, Jana Evans. "Nomadism, diaspora and deracination in contemporary migrant literatures." 2000. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9978478.
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The dissertation examines the nomadism of contemporary migrant writers who deliberately resist location and deterritorialize the dérive and déracinement of the nomad. Through nomadism, these writers elude the fixed identity categories—le nègre, le migrant, l'autre—often imposed on them by the country of adoption. These three writers—Edwidge Danticat, Dany Laferrière, and Linda Lê—each write out the diasporic and exilic dislocations of nomadism: linguistic, geopolitical and schizo-social. The hybrid methodology informing this study includes postcolonial, poststructuralist and feminist theories. The first four chapters establish the theoretical parameters for reading nomadic literatures, and the final chapter offers nomadic readings of contemporary Haitian and Vietnamese migrant literatures in France, Quebec, and the United States. These subtitles are problematic; yet, I theoretically problematize these terms and the national boundaries (geopolitical, psychological, and schizo-social) that they signify. Thus, the terms—Vietnamese and Haitian, specifically as situated in France, Québec and the United States of America—are read less as discrete geographical or national domains, and more as a transmuting (if also transnationalist) impulse, a setting of the two states into creative tension. I examine the multi-cultural and plurilingual ‘border crossings’ which occur in nomadic migrant writers, such as Lê, who writes out the linguistic and identitary vicissitudes of migration. Similarly, I explore how two francophone Haitian writers—an émigré in Québec (Laferrière) and the other a refugee/immigrant in the United States (Danticat)—take flight in different languages: the first in a minor usage of French, the latter in a minor usage of English. My analysis of these writers emphasizes several core themes: espaces exilaires; the deterritorialization of fixed identitary categories (whether around issues of gender, nationality, sexuality, or race); the destabilization of language, both the mother-tongue and the colonial (‘colonizing’) language; and the literary and cultural nomadism of migrant writers who ultimately resist immigration. Each migrant writer nomadically deterritorializes the spaces and tropes of migratory writing—territories of old, new, natal, adopted, native, acquired, immigrant, migrant and citizen. Through my readings, I show that even in texts by migrant writers, who move from one place to another, a sort of nomadism persists.
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Stranges, Peter Bartles. "Rebellion and nihilism in the works of Leila Sebbar and V. S. Naipaul." Thesis, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/1911/18818.
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This study proposes that Leila Sebbar and V. S. Naipaul, two widely-read contemporary novelists, intuitively understand Albert Camus' idea of revolt, using it to legitimate their non-essentialized, transcultural models of individual and collective identity. This dissertation views an Algerian teenager's rendezvous with Nobel Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul in Les Carnets de Sherazade as a magical portal through which Leila Sebbar allows us to see her fiction as a subversion and a reappropriation of the liberal philosophical principles underlying V. S. Naipaul's novels and travel journals. Although they interpret the increasing visibility of cultural, racial, and religious fundamentalisms in Western and non-Western societies as signs of a gathering nihilistic storm, neither Sebbar nor Naipaul believe that these epistemologically bounded ideologies of revolt are invincible. Instead, both depict rebellion, an epistemologically open-ended and altruistic form of revolt, as the exclusive means through which post-colonials across the globe can experience individual and communal wholeness---liberty, equality, fraternity, and peace---amidst the eponymous mixing of different peoples and truths in the late twentieth century.
Chapter One explores the concepts of rebellion and nihilism in Albert Camus' The Rebel and Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man. It also investigates the uncanny philosophical and thematic parallels in Leila Sebbar's and V. S. Naipaul's works. Chapter Two analyzes the theme of the returned gaze in Sebbar's Sherazade and Le Fou de Sherazade. It shows how Sherazade, Sebbar's title character, resists Orientalism and Islamic orthodoxy in a rebellious manner. The Algerian teenager challenges the "master's" desire for supremacy without denying his or her dignity. Chapter Three investigates the relationship between Sebbar's fiction and Lettres parisiennes: autopsie de l'exil, her correspondence with Canadian author Nancy Huston. It demonstrates that Sebbar's formulation of exile as a hybrid, contingent identitarian space in Lettres parisiennes is coterminous with Camus' notion of rebellion. Chapter Four is a detailed study of Sherazade's encounter with V. S. Naipaul in southwestern France in Les Carnets de Sherazade. Using Anne Donadey's model of mimicry, it claims that Sebbar subverts the British-Caribbean writer's representations of the ex-colonized's subjectivity and revalidates his underlying faith in rebellion.
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Gil, Fuentes Alexander. "Migrant Textuality: On the fields of Aimé Césaire's Et les chiens se taisaient." Thesis, 2012. https://doi.org/10.7916/D8377GXX.
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With the discovery of the earliest known manuscript version of Et les chiens se taisaient, we learn that Césaire had started thinking about the theater earlier than had been assumed, and most important, that he had originally envisioned this work as a historical drama based on the Haitian Revolution. “Migrant Textuality” explores the several versions and fragments of the play—from the manuscript to its last authorial instantiation in OEuvres Complètes in 1976—in order to shed light on the author’s troubled relationship with the history the play refers to and the historical circumstances of its production, and to outline a topology of the many migrations of text and documents in this monumental work. The first chapter reconstructs the genesis of the manuscript by careful analysis of the textual and material evidence. The second chapter grounds the first generic shift evinced by the work, from manuscript to the first published version in the poetry collection Les Armes miraculeuses, in the context of authorial responses to shifting editorial environments in the American hemisphere. The third chapter, “Legology,” departs from the particularity of the text to theorize textual blocks in general. The fourth chapter advocates for a form of reading that oscillates between macro- and microscopic approaches, using the topologies created in the previous chapter as proof-of-concept. The critical/digital work of the dissertation lays the foundation for a future digital edition of Césaire’s powerful poetic study of the radical anti-colonial rebel.
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Garcia, Enrique. "Children of the socialist paradise: Redefining social and esthetic values in post Cold -War Cuban cinema." 2007. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI3289238.
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After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuban filmmakers had to rethink the socialist values and esthetics developed in Cuba after the revolution of 1959. A number of these precepts, encapsulated in Julio García Espinosa's 1965 manifesto "For an Imperfect Cinema," had been influential in both Cuban filmmaking and Latin America's socialist cinema in general. As a consequence of capitalist globalization, many of these cultural concepts had to be reinvented for a new, more skeptical era disinclined to romanticize their legacy. This dissertation opens a discussion of the heritage of Cuban cinema in Latin American culture through an examination of the post-Soviet production of Cuban filmmakers working within the framework of the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC). An analysis of the films of Daniel Díaz Torres, Juan Carlos Tabío, Tomás Gutíerrez Alea, Humberto Solás, and Fernando Pérez traces these directors' struggle to create a new film vocabulary that depicts more accurately Cuban reality while remaining committed to revolutionary ideals. Further, the dissertation examines the reconstruction of history through the epic film adaptation of Alejo Carpentier's El siglo de las luces, and through Juan Padrón's animated features. It then reflects on issues of gender, auteurism, and superstardom centered on the persona of actor Jorge Perrugoría, as it speculates on the new path that Cuban cinema may follow in the 21st century with the new system of coproductions with countries such as Spain and Germany. In order to explore the changes in the Cuban film industry outlined above, I deconstruct the cultural and visual language developed by the Revolution. Drawing on the ideas of major schools of criticism such as Structuralism, Post-Modernism, Marxism, and Post-Colonialism, I prove that, while Marxist legacy is an essential part of the island's heritage, the multiethnic nature of Cuban culture is too complex to be limited or reduced to a single philosophy. This supports my argument that the Revolution's survival and finding its new place in the international community depends in part on an evolution from its original precepts, including an open dialogue with the other aspects of Cuban reality that constitute the fabric of the island's society.
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Knox, Alice. "Women writing race: Toni Morrison, Nadine Gordimer, Jean Rhys." 1998. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9841887.
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In this study I provide close textual analysis of the novels of three women writers whose work displays a consistent preoccupation with issues of race, and examine the ways in which their racial representations interplay with their depictions of gender and sexuality. Writing from a consciously gendered and racialized position, I combine personal narrative with theoretical discussion as I trace common racial themes, such as racial violence, cross-racial couples, and the denial or erasure of race. In an examination of other critics who have employed personal narrative as a form of literary analysis, I affirm the value of teaching and reading literary texts as a mode of activism. I also examine the depiction of white male protagonists, exploring the ways in which such depictions require a transracial, cross-gender performance on the part of the woman writer. Recurring patterns of racial dynamics emerge in the larger body of each author's work. A West Indian female racial identity emerges in Rhys' work as, consciously and unconsciously, her white heroines identify with black slave women, and seek another form of "blackness" through alcoholic oblivion. Gordimer's white women seek to slough off the racial privilege they are only too aware of, but Gordimer creates narratives in which white female identity merges textually with black male identity and black female identity, linguistically and through shared political action. Morrison's black women, doubly othered by race and by gender, seek to transcend all boundaries through wildly transgressive behavior, enacted boldly or imagined through language. In my final chapter, I explore the ambiguities and struggles of the construction of female racial identity in American, South African and Caribbean contexts, with particular attention to moments of textual rupture which signal the possibility of fluid identity. I demonstrate how Morrison, Gordimer, and Rhys employ a variety of narrative forms which allow readers to enter an in-between space, a starting point for the transformation of consciousness and of society. Literature is an ideal vehicle for entering the in-between space imaginatively, and dwelling there longer and longer as we rid ourselves of preconceived notions of race and gender.
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"Reactions to the French canon in the francophone novel." Tulane University, 2001.
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This dissertation focuses on reactions to the French canon in four Francophone novels. The study examines the use of allusions to, quotations from, and parallels with French canonical works in an effort to determine how these canonical works are mobilized in the creation of a new vision. The new visions generated through the relationship with the canonical range from the creation of new philosophical systems, to political action, to the colonial encounter, to the role of literature in the indoctrination of colonized subjects Chapter I examines Cheikh Hamidou Kane's treatment of Rene Descartes and Blaise Pascal in the novel L'Aventure ambigue. Parallels between the thought of Pascal and Kane's Diallobe people are discussed. What is ultimately revealed is how Descartes in particular is used to upset the credibility of the Diallobe ideological system and how his thought accompanies the arrival of a modern philosophical system Chapter II consists of a study of Ousmane Sembene's novel Les Bouts de bois de Dieu, and of his treatment of Andre Malraux's La Condition humaine in that novel. Sembene develops a new vision of the French canon and of the African characters' relationship to it. The chapter goes on to trace the process through which the French canonical text is subordinated to the values and traditions of the politically committed African characters Chapter III examines thematic and structural parallels between Amadou N'Diaye's Assoka ou les derniers fours de Koumbi and Gustave Flaubert's Salammbo. What emerges is a new vision of the colonial encounter in which the French are seen not as a civilizing force but as a tool in the hands of a monotheistic God bringing the rule of Islam to Africa The final chapter analyzes the mobilization of Arthur Rimbaud's Une Saison en enfer and of the modernist poetic tradition by Daniel Maximin in his novel L'Isole soleil. After showing how Rimbaud's prose poem functions as a structural motif, the chapter looks at how Maximin re-evaluates Caribbean literature's relationship with the French texts that have had such an important influence on Caribbean writers<br>acase@tulane.edu
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Llenín-Figueroa, Carmen Beatriz. "Imagined Islands: A Caribbean Tidalectics." Diss., 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10161/5420.
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<p><italic>Imagined Islands: A Caribbean Tidalectics</italic> confronts islands -at once as a problem, a concept, and a historical and mythical fact and product- by generating a tidalectical encounter between some of the ways in which islands have been imagined and used from without, primarily in the interest of the advancement of western capitalist coloniality, and from within, as can be gathered from Caribbean literatures. The perspective from without, predominantly based on negation, is explored in Section 1 using examples of islands in the Mediterranean, the Pacific, and the Atlantic, as well as a few canonical texts in various academic discourses. Section 2 discusses the perspective from within, an affirmative and creative counter-imagination on/of islands. Emerging from literary work by Derek Walcott, Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá, Édouard Glissant, and Alejo Carpentier, the chapters in Section 2 are organized around three key concepts associated with insularity -tropical light, the coast, and the sea/ocean- and the ways in which they force a rearrangement of enduring philosophical concepts: respectively, vision and sense perception, time and space, and history.<br><p> <italic>Imagined Islands'</italic> Introduction establishes, (1) the stakes of a project undertaken from an immanent perspective set in the Caribbean; (2) the method, inspired chiefly by Kamau Brathwaite's concept of <italic>tidalectics</italic>; (3) the epistemological problems posed by islands; (4) an argument for a different understanding of history, imagination, and myth inspired by Caribbean texts; and, (5) an overview of the academic debates in which <italic>Imagined Islands</italic> might make a significant contribution. The first section, "Islands from Without," comprising Chapter 1, provides an account of a few uses and imaginations of islands by capitalist coloniality as they manifest themselves both in the historical and the mythical imaginary realms. I focus on five uses and imaginations of islands (entrepôt island, sugar island, strategic island, paradise island, and laboratory island), with specific examples from the Mediterranean, the Pacific, and the Atlantic, and from five canonical texts ascribed to different disciplinary discourses: Plato's "Atlantis," Thomas More's <italic>Utopia</italic>, Daniel Defoe's <italic>Robinson Crusoe</italic>, Charles Darwin's <italic>The Origin of the Species</italic>, and Margaret Mead's <italic>Coming of Age in Samoa</italic>. I argue, on the one hand, that a dominant idea of the island based on negation (lack, dependency, boundedness, isolation, smallness, remoteness, among other characteristics) has coalesced in the expansionist and exploitative interests of capitalist coloniality, despite the fundamental promiscuity of the concept of "island." On the other hand, I find in the analyzed examples, especially in those of the mythical imaginary, residues in flight that remain open for creative reappropriation.<br><p> <italic>Imagined Islands'</italic> second section, "Islands from Within," encompassing Chapters 2 through 5, relocates the discussion within the Caribbean in order to argue that some of the region's literatures have produced a counter-imagination concerning insularity. This counter-imagination, resulting from an immanent and affirmative engagement with Caribbean islands, amounts to a way of thinking about and living the region and its possibilities in terms other than those of the dominant idea of the island. Each chapter opens with a historical and conceptual discussion of the ways in which light (Chapter 2), the coast (Chapters 3 and 4), and the sea/ocean (Chapter 5) have been imagined and deployed by capitalist coloniality, before turning to Caribbean literary texts as instances of a re-conceptualization of the aforementioned insular features and their concomitant rearrangement of apparently familiar philosophical concepts. Chapter 2 focuses on tropical light, vision, sense perception, Walcott's book-length poem <italic>Tiepolo's Hound</italic>, and Rodríguez Juliá's novel <italic>El espíritu de la luz</italic>. Chapter 3 turns to the insular coast, time, space, and the novels <italic>El siglo de las luces</italic> by Carpentier and <italic>The Fourth Century</italic> by Glissant. Chapter 5 goes out to sea and history with the help of Rodríguez Juliá's chronicles "El cruce de la Bahía de Guánica y otras ternuras de la Medianía" and "Para llegar a Isla Verde," as well as of sections from Glissant's <italic>Poetics of Relation</italic> and some of his poems from <italic>The Restless Earth</italic>. Finally, <italic>Imagined Islands'</italic> Coda points to some of the ripples this project produces for future study, and defends the urgent need to "live differently" the Caribbean archipelagoes.</p><br>Dissertation
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Duvivier, Sandra Caona. "Mapping intersections: Black women's identities and the politics of home in transnational black American women's fiction." 2006. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI3215912.
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Transnational black American women writers' literary renderings of "home" evidence an intersectional relationship among black American literature and cultures. This dissertation analyzes, through the trope of home, these authors' portrayals of the multiplicity of experiences informing black American women's lives and identities both domestically and transnationally. Embracing the transnationalism of black American female subjects, as well as a paradigm of intersectionality, this dissertation creates a framework that challenges not only canon formation with regards to black women's literature in the Americas, but also the rigidity surrounding racial/ethnic and national identities generally. To this end, it distinguishes itself from other scholarship that has largely analyzed these women's writings comparatively or within a larger diasporic framework---which, while insightful, tends to undermine the impact and specificity of "New World" or black American cultures. This dissertation consists of an Introduction that delineates "intersectionality," explicating its significance and relational aspects to what I refer to as "transnational black American." Chapter I analyzes how these black women writers' representations of home problematize "nation"; and, it situates the novels within particular historical, sociopolitical, gendered, and literary contexts. Chapter II investigates Paule Marshall's depictions of African American and Caribbean settings as homespaces integral to protagonist Avey Johnson's black cultural consciousness and healing in Praisesong for the Widow. Chapter III examines the ways Haiti and the United States serve as sites of female sexual violation in Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory . Chapter IV analyzes Toni Morrison's and Opal Palmer Adisa's delineations of African American women's attempts to establish a homespace and connection to their "black woman-ness" in transnational black American settings in Tar Baby and It Begins with Tears, respectively. Lastly, the Conclusion underscores this dissertation's significance in its challenging the rigidity of not only African American and Caribbean literary canons and their respective criticisms, but national boundaries and spaces, as well.
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Sankara, Edgard Wendimpousdé. "Francophone African and Caribbean autobiographies : a comparative study." 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/11269.
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"Ilhas riqueza, ilhas miseria. A representacao literaria da insularidadde num triangulo atlantico lusofono." Tulane University, 2000.
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To the traditional unity of the Lusophone world I will explore its variety not only geographic, dispersed over five continents, but also linguistic, cultural, social, economical and political. As a sample I will analyse the literature of four archipelagos located in the Atlantic Ocean, representing a country and a continent or part of a country---Azores (Portugal), Cape Verde, Sao Tome e Principe, Bahia islands (Brazil). At the same time I will define the character of the islander, based on studies about Caribbean Islands, by Pedreira, Benitez Rojo, Juan Floras, etc. This analysis will study different writers and more meaningful social and political periods, such as the rising of a black conciousness and struggle for independance, or the pessimistic disillusion of the current distopia in Azores and Brazil. Conclusions will be based on marxist, anti and post-colonialist, and post-modern theories of Fanon, Margarido, Appiah, Loomba, and Pratt. Particular emphasis will be placed on the humor that characterizes islanders in its different forms, based on Bakhtin and Bergson. The idea of island leads to two opposing images/conceits---abundance and absence, hence the title 'ilhas riqueza, ilhas miseria'. So, I will analyse that contrast and one of the consequences of the islander's reality: emmigration. The massive Portuguese and the Cape-Verdian exodus to the New World in the American whale-boats started around the turn of the XIX century, which remade Azores with a 'Tenth Island' or the L(USA)landia. A short view of the human potentials of three generations will be given by the studies of Eduardo Lourenco or the Californian or East-coast scholars Eduardo Mayone Dias, Dinis Borges and Onesimo Almeida Finally we will end up concluding that the islands and islanders are unfairly subject to marginalization and explotation by the authorities and elites. If it will be democratically given a place and the chance to express itselves to all lusophone countries or regions, Lusophonia will become more than 'the world the Portuguese created' as imagined in the 30's by the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, but rather a democratic project where nobody and nothing---race, colour, linguistic substracts, culture---will be lost<br>acase@tulane.edu
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Dyer-Spiegel, Jacob A. "Following Eshu-Eleggua's codes: A comparative approach to the literatures of the African diaspora." 2011. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI3465199.
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My project explores the impact of the great Orishas (Yoruba: "deities") of the crossroads, Eshu-Elegguá, on the thriving literary and visual arts of the African diaspora. Eshu-Elegguá are multiple figures who work between physical and spiritual realms, open possibilities, and embody unpredictability and chance. In chapter one I explore the codes, spaces, and functions of these translating, intermediary deities through cultural anthropology, religious studies, and art history. Chapter two explores patterns in the artistic employment of Eshu-Elegguá by analyzing these figures' appearance in visual arts and then in four texts: Mumbo Jumbo (Ismael Reed, 1972), Sortilégio: Mistério Negro (Abdias do Nasicmento, 1951), Chago de Guisa (Gerardo Fulleda León, 1988), and Brown Girl in the Ring (Nalo Hopkinson, 1998). Chapter three explores how those patterns converge in Midnight Robber (Nalo Hopkinson, 2000) by looking closely at the novel's narrators and translators, Eshu and Elegguá. I argue that Midnight Robber, when read through the literary theories and poetry of Kamau Brathwaite, is a novel "possessed" by the Orishas and that they take on authorial roles. Chapter four analyzes the translation of Midnight Robber into Spanish ( Ladrona de medianoche, Isabel Merino Bode, 2002); presents a way of translating the novel's multiple languages; and puts contemporary translation theories in dialogue with Eshu-Elegguá's translative and interpretive functions. Chapter five argues for a way of reading Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys, 1966) through the figures of Eshu-Elegguá. ^ The objective is to explore the aesthetic codes and philosophies that the figures of Eshu-Elegguá carry into the texts; trace their voices across multiple forms of cultural expression; and navigate the dialogues that these intermediary figures open between a group of literary texts that have not yet been studied together. The dissertation extends the critical work on the selected literary texts; uses the arts to further understand the nature of these deities of communicability; and analyzes Afro-Atlantic texts through figures and interpretive systems from within the tradition. By surveying contemporary translation theories and based on my close reading of the translating capacities and metaphors that Eshu-Elegguá embody, I offer a new model for translation.^
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Perisic, Alexandra. "Contesting Globalization: Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Atlantic World Economy." Thesis, 2014. https://doi.org/10.7916/D8JD4TXP.
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This dissertation examines how contemporary narrative fiction in French and Spanish represents experiences of migration and the circulation of capital and goods in the globalized Atlantic. I argue that the attempt to imagine an increasingly globalized world has been accompanied by a waning interest in character development and an increased interest in what could be characterized as the spatial dimension of literature. Many recent `global fictions' present readers with impenetrable characters whose interiority is inaccessible. The lack of depth is, however, replaced by geographical breadth. As characters move through space, bringing into relation several different geographical locations, authors draw attention to transnational sites of marginalization and imagine alternative power configurations.
Several important studies have examined the engagement of Francophone writers with globalization in the late 20th and early 21st century. While these readings are sophisticated and persuasive, they remain confined within the Francophone context, rarely establishing comparisons with the Anglophone and the Hispanophone contexts. We thus end up with somewhat contradictory concepts such as Francophone or Hispanophone transnationalism,`world literature' and globalization. This seems even more paradoxical given that several Francophone writers, including Maryse Condé and Edouard Glissant, have set their novels in non-Francophone countries. My dissertation undertakes translinguistic literary criticism in order to address this gap in critical discourse.
I limit my focus to what I term the Atlantic world economy, that is, the countries touched by the Atlantic triangle and marked by a history of population displacement and cultural mixing inaugurated through colonial slavery. The authors I have selected position their work in the Atlantic framework. Some more explicitly, like Fatou Diome whose novel is entitled The belly of the Atlantic. Others, like Maryse Condé and Roberto Bolaño, by moving protagonists between some of the major centers of the Atlantic economy. They all, however, pose the question of a globalized Atlantic, distancing themselves from the Atlantic as a triangular space, and reframing it as a space encompassing many poles. The notion of the globalized Atlantic further underscores the tension between a regional framework and a globalized world within which these authors are operating.
At the turn of the 21st century movements resisting the effects of global capitalism have come into existence in several countries, including Egypt, Chile, the United States, Brazil and Turkey. These modes of activism require us to recalibrate some of our geopolitical categories as a way of thinking about transnational citizenship. The authors in my corpus deploy literary
strategies that complement the activism of global socioeconomic and political movements. This dissertation focuses on their imagining of narrative fiction as a space that is both globalized and resistant to the dominant political and economic dimensions of globalization.
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"The representation of Paris in Spanish-American fiction." Tulane University, 1989.
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This dissertation involves an examination of the image of Paris as it is developed in Spanish American fiction, beginning at the turn of the century with the modernistas and extending through highly complex contemporary treatments. No attempt is made to provide an exhaustive catalogue of Spanish American novels that take place in Paris, instead, there is brief reference to a number of works with discussion in detail reserved for the novels and short stories found particularly interesting or representative. These are Diaz Rodriguez's Idolos rotos (1901), Blest Gana's Los trasplantados (1904), Edwards Bello's Criollos en Paris (1933), Salazar Bondy's Pobre gente de Paris (1958), Elena Garro's Reencuentro de personajes (written in 1962; published in 1982), Julio Cortazar's Rayuela (1963), Julio Ramon Ribeyro's La juventud en la otra ribera and Alejo Carpentier's El recurso del metodo (1974) Over a period of nearly a century, Spanish American writers have treated Paris as a problem. Earlier writers play on the complex of pastoral associations through which Paris is regarded not as a city, but as the city (center of corruption, center of enlightenment) and Latin America, even its metropoli, as the countryside (a rural retreat that brings to mind ideas of spiritual regeneration and the values of childhood, or a sinkhole of numbing ignorance and ennui) Later novelists are keenly aware of the literary tradition that lies behind them and of the difficulty involved in representing Paris, a place that has become a commonplace. Both Cortazar and Carpentier tend to view the city as a text. Yet, although their vision is radically different from their predecessors, they, too, are trying to come to terms with the Other, and with the frightening intuition, glimpsed in almost all of these novels, that the real Paris--whether it is viewed as social body, a core of hidden knowledge or a foreign text--will always lie beyond the Latin American's ken. This manuscript is devoted to a discussion of the ways in which Spanish American writers have responded to the problems created by Paris, both as cultural and literary phenomenon, and of the strategies they have developed in fiction to communicate those responses<br>acase@tulane.edu
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"The mechanisms of forging a national consciousness: A comparative approach to modern Brazil and Cuba, 1930-1964." Tulane University, 1992.
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A great majority of the intellectuals in the post-independence period in Latin America tend to be preoccupied with distancing themselves from European culture by attempting to answer the question: ques Quienes somos? (Who are we?) and ques Como somos? (How are we?) This was a vital step in the process of decolonization. While national intellectuals attempted to define who they were, they invariably extended their particular reality to mean 'national reality.' This dissertation will investigate the process by which national writers attempted to define their national identity, by looking closely at the case of the Brazilian and Cuban intellectuals from 1930-1964 In forging a national consciousness, dominant intellectuals exploited salient national symbols, which emerged out of the context of the 1930s. Under different historical circumstances, however, challenges to the dominant myths began to emerge in both countries. Black intellectuals and nationalists, in particular, had their own views about their national image In the cases of both Cuba and Brazil, black intellectuals were no less patriotic or nationalistic than their white counterparts. In any case, the national myths were so forceful that they became almost impossible to discredit. The transition to the new political generation in the 1960s and the continued use of the dominant national myths underscored this truth Both Cuba and Brazil, experienced revolutions in the 1960s that were more conservative, from an intellectual perspective, than the revolutions of the 1930s. The effect on the intellectual community was remarkably similar in regards to the issue of national culture This study is interested in the mechanism by which the national state and nationalist intellectuals forged a national cultural identity. With access to the major means of communication, the dominant intellectuals, from the right or the left, succeeded in propagating their idea of culture, which was remarkably similar, through the major mediums of communication. The purpose of this dissertation is to present in a succinct fashion the process by which national inculcation occurs and to point out in a broader context how economic and ethnic minorities are co-opted by patriotism<br>acase@tulane.edu