Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Caribbean poetry'

This thesis seeks to demonstrate that there is a direct relationship between the emergence of poetry as a performing art in the English speaking Caribbean and phases of nationalist agitation from the uprisings against unemployment, low pay and colonial neglect during 1937-8 to the present. Though the poetry has many variations in scope, ranging from light-hearted entertainment, its principal momentum has been one of protest, nationalism and revolutionary sentiment. The thesis seeks to relate tone, style and content both to specific periods and cultural contexts, and to the degree of engagement of the individual artist in the political struggle against oppression. Frequently theatrical, the poetry has commanded a stage and a popular audience. Though urban in style, it is rooted in older, rural traditions. Creole, the vernacular of the masses, is a vital common denominator. The poetry is aurally stimulating, and often highly rhythmic. The popular music of the day has played an integral part, and formative role in terms of composition. The fundamental historical dynamic of the English-speaking Caribbean has been one of violent imperialist imposition on the one hand, and resistance by the black masses on the other. Creole language, with its strong residuum of African grammatical constructs, concepts and vocabulary, has been a central vehicle of resistance. It is a low-status language in relation to the officially-endorsed Standard English. The thesis argues that artists' assertion of Creole, and total identification with it through their own voice, is a significant act of defiance and patriotism. Periods of heightened agitation in the recent past have each led to the emergence of a distinctive form of performance poetry. Chapter two examines the role of Louise Bennett as a mouthpiece of black pride and nationalist sentiment largely in the period preceding independence. Her principal aim is the affirmation of the black Jamaican's fundamental humanity. She uses laughter both as a curative emotional release and as an expression of mental freedom. She lays the foundations of a comic tradition which does not fundamentally challenge the contradictions of the post-independence period. Chapter three relates the emergence of the Dub Poets of Jamaica to the development of Rastafarianism into a mass post-independence nationalist revival, and to the contribution of intellectuals, most symbolically Walter Rodney, to the process of decolonization. Reggae music, the principal creative response to the dynamics of the period both in terms of lyrics and rhythmic tension, infuses the work of Michael Smith, Cku Onuora, Mutabaruka and Erian Meeks examined in this study. Chapter four illustrates the development of performed poetry in the context of periods of insurrection and revolution in the East Caribbean. It examines the Black Rower movement as a stimulus to cultural nationalism and revolutionary sentiment, and its transcendence to internationalism and socialism in the context of the Grenada Revolution. Abdul Malik straddles and exemplifies the creative dynamic which exists between urban, industrial Trinidad and its tiny, rural and poor neighbour, Grenada.

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.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, 2007.
Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Dec. 9, 2008). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-05, Section: A, page: 1931. Advisers: John Johnson; Portia Maultsby.

Encounter narratives are often associated with the accounts of first contact between Europeans and the Indigenous inhabitants of New Worlds. However, they are also the means by which writers assert their self-determination from the coloniser. Notable examples can be found in the works of Martinique scholar Edouard Glissant, the late Barbados poet and scholar Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Yoogum and Kudjela poet Lionel Fogarty, and Yankunytjatjara poet Ali Cobby Eckermann. Each poet validates the encountered figure's right to refuse the reader's comprehension, a shared signature demonstrating their commitment to resist the self-Other tradition of Western metaphysics. This dissertation is the first scholarly effort to examine their works together and one of the first comparative studies of Aboriginal and Caribbean poetry; drawing out formal, conceptual, and historical affinities between these poets' projects. Aboriginal and Caribbean writings on the encounter are commonly framed by an overarching structural opposition between Caribbean rootlessness and Aboriginal rootedness. More provocatively, I suggest that a range of Aboriginal and Caribbean writers themselves affirm this structural opposition by portraying one another in obverse terms. In doing so, I resituate these poets in a host of new theoretical figurations that challenge the given cultural or political groupings with which their poetic extrapolations of the encounter are read, most notably the rootlessness of Caribbean literature and the rootedness of Aboriginal literature. Having shown that the rootless-rooted binary limits our understanding of the relational complexities of these poets' projects, I upend this opposition by reading from an inverted theoretical perspective: Brathwaite and Glissant as the forbears of an Indigenous literature, Fogarty and Eckermann as mobile writers in a planetary context.

English
Ph.D.
"Rhythmic Literacy: Poetry, Reading and Public Voices in Black Atlantic Poetics" analyzes the poetry of the African American Langston Hughes and the Jamaican Louise Bennett during the 1940s. Through an examination of the unique similarities of their poetic projects, namely their engagement of performance to build their audiences, their experiments with poetic personae to represent vernacular social voices, their doubleness as national and transnational figures, their circulation of poetry in radio and print journalism and their use of poetry as pedagogy to promote reading, this dissertation establishes a new perspective on the role of poetry in decolonizing language practices. While Hughes and Bennett are often celebrated for their representation of oral language and folk culture, this project reframes these critical discussions by drawing attention to how they engage performance to foster an embodied form of reading that draws on Creole knowledge systems, which I term rhythmic literacy. Growing up in the U.S and Jamaica in the early twentieth century, Hughes and Bennett were both subjected to a similar Anglophone transatlantic schoolroom poetry tradition, which they contend with as one of their only available poetic models. I argue that memorization and recitation practices play a formative role in the development of their poetic projects. As an enactment and metaphor for the dynamics of colonial control, this form of mimicry demonstrates to them the power of embodied performance to reclaim language from dominant forces. This dissertation reveals how black Atlantic poetics refashions the institutional uses of poetry in early twentieth-century U.S and British colonial education for the purposes of decolonization.
Temple University--Theses

viii, 233 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.
This dissertation argues that certain iconic poems have shaped the canon of American poetry. Not merely "canonical" in the usual sense, iconic poems enjoy a special cultural sanction and influence; they have become discourses themselves, generating our notions about American poetry. By "iconic" I mean extraordinarily famous works like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Paul Revere's Ride," Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," and Claude McKay's "If We Must Die," that do not merely reside in the national memory but that have determined each poet's reception and thus have shaped the history of American poetry. Through case studies, I examine longstanding assumptions about these poets and the literary histories and myths surrounding their legendary texts. In carefully historicized readings of these and other iconic poems, I elucidate the pressure a single poem can exert on a poet's reputation and on American poetry broadly. I study the iconic poem in the context of the poet's corpus to demonstrate its role within the poet's oeuvre and the role assigned to it by canon makers. By tracing a poem's reception, I aim to identify the national, periodic, political, and formal boundaries these poems enforce and the distortions they create. Because iconic poems often direct and justify our inclusions and exclusions, they are of particular use in clarifying persistent obstacles to the canon reformation work of the last thirty years. While anthologies have become more inclusive in their selections and self-conscious about their ideological motives, many of the practices regarding individual poets and poems have remained unchanged over the last fifty years. Even as we include more poets in the canon, we often ironically do so by isolating a particular portion of the career, impulse in the work, or even a single poem, narrowing rather than expanding the horizon of our national literature. Through close readings situated in historical and cultural contexts, I illustrate the varying effects of iconic poems on the poet, other poems, and literary history.
Committee in charge: Dr. Karen J. Ford, Chair; Dr. John T. Gage, Member; Dr. Ernesto J. Martinez, Member; Dr. Leah W. Middlebrook, Outside Member

This thesis consists of a poetry manuscript and a critical component that considers the poetics and history that inform the writing of that manuscript. Critical Component: Charting the Sea in Caribbean Poetry This thesis focuses on the influence of the sea in constructing identity in the writing of Kamau Brathwaite, Derek Walcott, and Dionne Brand. It is particularly interested in examining how these poets trace identity primarily in The Arrivants, Omeros, and No Language is Neutral through their various employments of the sea and liquidity in those works. I then read selections from two of my poetic forbearers from the British Virgin Islands - Alphaeus Norman and Verna Penn Moll - in order to examine the construction of the sea in their poetry against the canonised work of Brathwaite, Walcott, and Brand. I argue through close contextual readings of the selected works that through engagement of various approaches each poet arrives at a portrait of Caribbean identity that is constructed integrally through the fluid, mutable natures of the sea. The five poets are scrutinised in four chapters, in relation to their personal philosophies regarding national or regional identity through essay writings and interviews but more prominently in close readings of their poetry and in particular their representations of the sea. I begin by arguing that in Brathwaite's The Arrivants (1980), the importance of the sea in the various formations of West Indian identity is represented through the exercising of his tidalectic process in his reconstructions of the archetypes of Legba and Ananse, and his ritualising of cricket and calypso. In Walcott's Omeros (1990), the sea is presented as the embodiment of history itself through which all of Saint Lucia's contemporary inhabitants must access their ancestral memories. Walcott utilises the Atlantic as a creolising force in his reimagining of the Homeric archetypes of Philoctetes, Achilles, Hector, and Helen. Brand however, departs from this metaphorical interpretation of the sea and turns inward, redefining the boundaries of land, sea, and sexual desire in Trinidad through a remapping of that island that is focused on the ocean, waterways, and the bodies of women. Lastly, British Virgin Islander poets Alphaeus Osario Norman and Verna Penn Moll embrace different mythic versions of the sea. Norman's work creates a distinct sailor aesthetic that resonates with classic European naval and militaristic poetry as a way to invoke a national pride, while Penn Moll focuses on performances of cultural and communal waterside rituals to frame narratives of local history and village culture. Ultimately, I argue that the sea is presented variously as a portal through which history and tribal memory can be accessed, and as a supernaturally transformative force for the poet. Creative Component: Make Us All Islands Make Us All Islands is a poetry manuscript based in the British Virgin Islands that explores historical and personal relationships with the sea. The first section revolves around the various arrivals of liberated Africans rescued from slave ships wrecked or captured by the British Navy in the early 1800s. The liberated Africans were not enslaved, but rather forced into indentureship before ultimately being segregated from society and then disappearing from history. The second section is built around the departure of a generation of Tortolan men to work in the sugar plantations of the Dominican Republic at the turn of the following century, alongside other Anglophone Afro-Caribbean migrants. A large portion of these poems are built around accounts of the greatest boating disaster in the islands' history, the loss of a schooner christened Fancy Me which wrecked in a hurricane in 1926 off the coast of the Dominican island Saona. The final movement personalises this exercise and focuses on the poet's interactions with the sea and memory.

Elaborato finale che tratta dell'interessante quanto controverso argomento della poesia per l'infanzia, scritta da autori caraibici nel panorama inglese. Nella prima parte della tesi verrà presentato in maniera generale tale argomento. In particolar modo, l'attenzione sarà puntata sulle difficoltà associate: all'identificazione di un pubblico ideale ed uniforme per questo tipo di poesia; alla canonizzazione di questo genere; al consenso su cosa sia adatto o meno ad un pubblico tanto giovane; all'applicazione di vari approcci letterari ad una branca della letteratura ancora considerata come inferiore. Inoltre, la presentazione di una breve storia della poesia per l'infanzia verrà usata come punto di partenza per una successiva analisi dei tratti considerati fondanti di questo genere. Nella seconda parte dell'elaborato, ad una breve introduzione storica riguardo le popolazioni caraibiche e le loro lingue creole seguirà un'analisi dettagliata dei lavori di tre poeti caraibici che pubblicano nel panorama inglese (James Berry; Grace Nichols; e John Agard). Quello che si vuole dimostrare con questa tesi è che la poesia per l'infanzia di tali autori ha portato rinnovamento e freschezza ad un genere a volte stantio, che anche grazie a loro può assumere nuovamente un ruolo importante nella formazione delle future generazioni. La speranza è che i versi vibranti e musicali di questi autori siano testimonianza e insegnamento di un futuro di tolleranza e comprensione reciproca, magari sotto l'egida di una poesia per l'infanzia rinnovata e sicuramente più accessibile.

En esta tesis analizaré en la poesía de Georgina Herrera, Nancy Morejón y Excilia Saldaña 1 los conceptos de género y raza y cómo han sido apropiados del esquema patriarcal y redefinidos en la elaboración de identidad y nación a través de lo que Flora González Mandri y Catherine Davies han llamado la memoria cultural. Mi propósito es demostrar como dichas poetas han subvertido, a través de la palabra, un discurso historicamente maniqueísta que ha servido para reafirmar la doble subyugación de raza y género, como también exploro los resortes de auto-inscripción y el imaginario mítico-cultural que cada poeta emplea en su poesía para desmantelar el paradigma patriarcal. Lejos de ofrecer un análisis exhaustivo de la obra de cada escritora, mi objetivo es más bien deslindar las complejidades culturales que enmarca la producción literaria de cada una. He tomando en cuenta el contexto sociohistórico de donde surgen para comprender el lugar que han reclamado en la producción y reproducción cultural. Aunque no abordo los discursos de raza y género mediante un filtro estrictamente teórico, más bien utilizo ciertas teorías como ópticas en el vislumbrar poético de la aportación de cada poeta, me he apoyado cuando necesario en algunos postulados feministas, postestructuralistas, y postcoloniales. No obstante mi intención es ante todo ofrecer una lectura que se fundamenta en el análisis literario. En ciertos poemas aplico algunos aspectos de la teoría feminista de bell hooks, la contrapropuesta que ofrece Oyèrónké Oy ĕwùmi ante el discurso feminista occidental, el planteamiento sobre el poder del lenguaje y la dominación del discurso de Michel Foucault, y la teoría postcolonial de Homi Bhaba sobre el tercer espacio y la mímica. Herrera, Morejón, y Saldaña se adueñan de sus historias y reivindican las de sus ancestros femeninos mediante el protagonismo que ejercen como creadora/sujetos. Utilizando los temas de la memoria, la reconstrucción de la identidad, el homenaje a los antepasados femeninos, la recreación del vínculo con África como matriz, el rescate de la imagen de la mujer en el proyecto de identidad nacional, y la exaltación de la maternidad, dichas poetas deconstruyen los estereotipos afro-femeninos para después reconstruir y proyectar la imagen de la mujer dentro de un marco de resistencia. En su afán de desmontar los códigos establecidos, desarticulando y reconstruyendo el pasado para redefinir la identidad de la mujer afrocubana de manera protagónica en el presente, la obra de Morejón, Herrrera, y Saldaña rompe y transciende los parametros vanguardistas del negrismo 2 misógino de la primera mitad del siglo XX. Tras su auto-inscripción dentro de la poesía, la mujer afrocubana se plantea como creadora y portadora de la palabra constructora. En su lucha por crear un sujeto lírico que la represente y quede impreso en el subconsciente imaginario cultural, emerge como la voz más influyente de la poesía cubana post-revolucionaria.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 2000.
Title from title page screen, viewed May 4, 2006. Dissertation Committee: John Shields (chair), Lucia Getsi, Nancy Tolson. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 179-190) and abstract. Also available in print.

Cette étude porte sur l’exploration du processus et du phénomène par lesquels l’identité nationale et culturelle des Caraïbes a été construite. Dans la poursuite de cet objectif, deux poèmes majeurs et une pièce de théâtre dramatique de Derek Walcott seront examinés. La première s’agit de son poème épique créole, Omeros, qui se concentre sur les enjeux de l’identité créole et le concept de l’héros national.Étant donnée que la poésie de Walcott est fortement influencée par sa vie personnelle et en conséquence,par la vie dans son pays natal, l'île de Sainte-Lucie, il paraît indispensable à examiner son poème autobiographique, Another Life, qui est un compte rétrospectif de Walcott et son parcours artistiquejusqu’à l’âge de 33 ans. En outre, puisque Omeros met en parallèle la poésie homérique, cette étude bénéficie également d’une exploration de son autre réécriture de la poésie homérique, The Odyssey : aPlay. Cette étude tente à monter que ces deux réécritures se sont complémentaires : le poème épique antillais est la quête d’identité du point de vue du sujet colonial, tandis que la pièce de théâtre dramatique antillaise est la quête d’identité de la perspective du colonisateur. L’étude de la poésie et des pièces de théâtre dramatiques de Walcott nous aident à percevoir les façons dont le poète antillais tente à déconstruire l’importance de la tradition littéraire occidentale à travers la réécriture de la poésie homérique. Cette tradition perpétue l’opposition binaire de supériorité/infériorité qui joue un rôle déterminant dans la construction de l’identité d’un individu. En déplaçant les personnages et la littérature de Saint Lucie de leur emplacement dans les marges vers le centre, Walcott décentre la poésie homérique, et la littérature occidentale. Créolisation, Colonialisme, Postcolonialisme,Déconstruction, Poésie homérique, Histoire, Mémoire, Réécriture
This thesis seeks to explore the process and phenomenon through which Caribbean national and cultural identity has been constructed. In order to achieve this goal, two of Derek Walcott’s major poems and one of his dramas have been chosen. The first is his Creole epic poem, Omeros, which concentrates on the issues of Creole identity and the concept of national hero. Since Walcott’s poetry is highly influenced by his personal life and consequently life in his homeland, the island of Saint Lucia, it seems indispensable to study his autobiographical poem, Another Life, which is Walcott’s retrospective review of his artistic journey until the age of 33. Moreover, since Omeros draws parallelswith Homeric epics, it seems highly beneficial to this study to include his other rewriting of Homericepics, The Odyssey : a Play. This study makes an effort to show that these two rewritings are complementary to each other: the West Indian epic poem is the quest for identity seen from the point of view of the colonized subject, whereas the West Indian stage drama is the quest for identity from the colonizer’s perspective. Studying Walcott’s poetry and dramas helps one perceive the ways in which the West Indian poet makes an effort to deconstruct the importance of the Western literary tradition through rewriting the Homeric epics. This tradition perpetuates the binary opposition of superiority/inferiority which plays a seminal role in the construction of individual identity. By displacing the Saint Lucian characters and literature from their place in the margins to the center, Walcott decenters the Homeric epics, and Western literature. Creolisation, Colonialism, Postcolonialism,Deconstruction, , History, Memory, Rewriting

Thesis (M.A.)--Florida State University, 2005.
Advisor: Dr. Daniel Vitkus, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of English. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed June 7, 2005). Document formatted into pages; contains v, 54 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

This project explores visually experimental poetry as a particular trend in Caribbean poetry since the 1970's. Although visual experimentation in Caribbean poetry is immediately recognizable – for example, its play with font styles and sizes, its jagged margins, its division of the page into multiple discourse spaces, its use of images – little critical attention has been paid to the visual qualities of Caribbean poetry. Instead, definitions of Caribbean poetry have remained focussed upon oral/aural aesthetics, excluding its use of and contribution to late 20th century experimental poetic practice. By focussing on the poetry of Shake Keane, Claire Harris, Marlene Nourbese Philip, Kamau Brathwaite, and LeRoy Clarke, I bring post-colonial literary criticism into discussion with contemporary debates regarding visual poetic practice in North America. In so doing, this project values Caribbean visual poetry both for its expression of Caribbean cultural experience and for its contributions to broader experimental poetry movements. I argue that visual experimentation functions to disrupt traditional linear reading processes, which thereby allows poets to perform the flux of time and space in post-colonial contexts. Furthermore, such disruption of linear reading practices, often manifested by the positioning of multiple discourses on one page, serves to create a polyvocal discourse that resists patriarchal and colonialist power structures. Valuing the visual qualities of Caribbean poetry as signifying elements, this dissertation explores the aesthetic and social implications of inscription and visual design in Caribbean poetry.

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.

This thesis investigates the dual concepts of place as home and place within the canon for diasporic communities, immigrants, and minorities within Canada. This thesis argues that a new understanding of “home” is necessary as the immigrant, forced within an in-between place of “there” (the birth-country) and “here” (the host-country), does not experience “home” as a singular, rooted location. “Home” for the immigrant is a feeling of belonging that spans multiple places simultaneously. This investigation of politics through poetics is grounded in the belief that national literature reflects national identity. As the immigrant presence within Canada has heretofore been perceived as secondary to the national identity, and diasporic and immigrant literature as other-to the Canadian canon, this thesis purposes to re-imagine that national identity in a way that includes minority literature. I focus on the work of two widely known Caribbean Canadian poets: Cyril Dabydeen and Lorna Goodison.

This thesis examines whether Afro-Caribbean, poets of the English-speaking West Indies and black American poets express differences in their sense of Africa and of being African-descended, and, if so, what the nature of those differences might be. Section I constitutes a brief overview of the slave histories in both regions, so as to suggest some political and sociological bases for the divergent literary expressions of Africa that might emerge. Sections II and III explore a range of written and oral poems, from both regions, that have Africa as a theme or a central reference. In these sections, the pattern that emerges is that West Indian poets generally employ strong and concrete topographical, political, religious and historical images of Africa, and increasingly, over the course of the twentieth century, accept and incorporate the West African component of their racial heritage, whereas black American poets show a vague sense of Africa as a place, refer more often to North Africa (and specifically Pharaohic Egypt, via parallels between the Mosaic era of the Old Testament and the American slave period) than to West African, and, overall, only connect their experiences of being "black" in America explicitly to their West African origins at a couple of points in their poetic history-during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and the Black Power era of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The conclusion suggests that acknowledging and understanding these poetic divergences, as well as the attendant and underlying historical and social divergences, might help ease the tensions that are currently mounting between the black American and West Indian peoples.

This dissertation examines how the work of four Puerto Rican poets – Julia de Burgos, Clemente Soto Vélez, Martín Espada, and Naomi Ayala – demonstrates a poetics of resistance. While resistance takes a variety of forms in their poetic discourse, this project asserts that these poets have and continue to play an integral role in the cultural decolonization of Puerto Rico, which has been generally unacknowledged in both the critical scholarship on their work and the narrative of Puerto Rico’s anti-colonial struggle. Chapter One discuses the theoretical concepts used in defining a poetics of resistance, including Barbara Harlow’s definition of resistance literature, Edward Said’s concepts of cultural decolonization, and Jahan Ramazani’s theory of transnational poetics. Chapter Two provides an overview of Puerto Rico’s unique political status and highlights several pivotal events in the nation’s history, such as El Grito de Lares, the Ponce Massacre, and the Vieques Protest to demonstrate the continuity of the Puerto Rican people’s resistance to oppression and attempted subversion of their colonial status. Chapter Three examines Julia de Burgos’ understudied poems of resistance and argues that she employs a rhetoric of resistance through the use of repetition, personification, and war imagery in order to raise the consciousness of her fellow Puerto Ricans and to provoke her audience into action. By analyzing Clemente Soto Vélez’s use of personification, anaphora, and most importantly, juxtaposition, Chapter Four demonstrates that his poetry functions as a dialectical process and contends that the innovative form he develops throughout his poetic career reinforces his radical perspective for an egalitarian society. Chapter Five illustrates how Martín Espada utilizes rich metaphor, sensory details, and musical imagery to foreground issues of social class, racism, and economic exploitation across geographic, national, and cultural borders. Chapter six traces Naomi Ayala’s feminist discourse of resistance that denounces social injustice while simultaneously expressing a female identity that seeks liberation through her understanding of history, her reverence for memory, and her relationship with the earth. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that Burgos, Soto Vélez, Espada, and Ayala not only advocate for but also enact resistance and social justice through their art.

This thesis analyzes how Afro-Caribbean poets writing in English appropriate language and use memory as a thematic tool to articulate postcolonial identities. The present study is organized in three parts: the first part provides the necessary theoretical background regarding postcolonial theory, the politics of hybridity and resistance
the second part examines poets&rsquo
struggles over language and social forms of poetry
the third part deals with the site of memory as a revisionary tool in rewriting history poetically, binding pre-colonial and colonial identities, and healing the fractured psyches of postcolonial societies. The struggle over language and the use of memory enable the Afro-Caribbean poet to reconfigure individual and collective identities. For these purposes, Grace Nichols&rsquo
i is a long memoried woman (1983), Edward Kamau Brathwaite&rsquo
s X/Self (1987) and Linton Kwesi Johnson&rsquo
s Tings&rsquo
an Times (1991) will be analyzed.

This dissertation establishes a transatlantic connection between Brazil, the United States and the Caribbean through the discussion of two contemporary literary movements: Sarau da Cooperifa, in São Paulo, and Nuyorican poetry, from the Puerto Rican poets living in New York City. Although these places share significant differences in terms of colonial and postcolonial history, they share similar experiences in terms of race and class representations. From similar oppressive realities, I argue that they also build similar strategies of resistance and urban discourse. By carrying a secondary citizenship status, Nuyorican poets and poets from the Brazilian periphery find in creative writing ways to reinvent themselves as subjects of their own history, a story written and reinvented in the streets, in the street corners, in barber shops, in the back yard, in bars and pubs. They take the street as epistemological locus in order to expand the concept of political intervention, be it while celebrating life or ritualizing death. In this sense, the street is the site for unrestricted access to poetry, and poetry is the element that fits these subjects in the history of the city. The work of Sergio Vaz, Ferrez, Allan da Rosa, Elizandra Souza, Willie Perdomo, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Miguel Algarín, Miguel Piñero and Sandra Maria Esteves is read through the lenses of African Diaspora theories and its relation to literary criticism, anthropology, history, discourse analysis, Black feminist theory and Latino studies. I share Edouard Glissant’s understanding that the Africans, who were forced to come to the Americas and the Caribbean upon slavery, did not bring only their body. They also brought with their body a worldview, a way of dealing with adversity, an epistemological understanding that has allowed them to outlive the physical death by overcoming the imputation of social death. Thus, this dissertation argues that cultural production is a political production, and that it has been used by racialized and impoverished minority individuals and groups across the globe as strategic tool in the struggle against oppression.
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In this study we examine the development of the female poetic voice in the Puerto Rican context. Taking from the theoretical frameworks of Cultural Studies, Feminist Studies and New Historicism we re-read the political, cultural and literary history of Puerto Rico and its relation to the construction of the representations of Woman in texts written by women as well as those by men. In the first chapter we analyze the weight of gender and history in the elaboration of general discourse. We point out how all texts speak from a particular gendered perspective and respond to a historically determined moment which requires critical analysis that takes into consideration these contextual phenomena. From here we begin to re-examine the development of the female poetic creation from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1930s. We study the change of sovereignty and the political, social and cultural impact that this had on the literature of Puerto Rico. Mainly, we look into the gestation of a political-literary discourse created by Puerto Rican intellectuals, who were at the same time, responsible for the political and cultural events of the island. The second chapter explores the creation of a new political project for Puerto Rico which begins in 1940s and culminates with the Commonwealth. In addition, we review the political projects of the Commonwealth which required the active participation of literature since it was through literature that a cultural nationalism would be built, a nationalism that would compensate for the lack of an independent political state. Concluding this second chapter, we re-examine the decades of the sixties and seventies, viewing them as a period of change and of social and political struggle. We study the gradual separation of the literary and political spaces, which allowed a more transgressive discourse as well as a more authentic female voice. The third chapter is a critical analysis of the female poetic voice through the twentieth century. Among the selected poets are: Clara Lair, Haydee Ramirez de Arellano, Marigloria Palma, Angelamaria Davila, Olga Nolla, Manuel Ramos Otero and Mayra Santos Febres.

Le roman sentimental est un des genres les plus lus, les plus traduits et les plus diffusés. Malgré sa mauvaise réputation, il est étonnant de constater le nombre de ces romans vendus, tous pays confondus. Dans les Antilles, ce phénomène est particulièrement palpable : la présence, et la réception de ces œuvres témoignent de l’engouement pour le genre. Notre étude a pour objectif de dégager d’un corpus sentimental antillais les aspects les plus significatifs. Nous analyserons, d’une part, le schéma narratif élaboré en marge de celui proposé par le roman sentimental classique et, d’autre part, l’esthétique du quotidien mise en place pour créer un sentiment d’appartenance chez le lectorat. Il nous sera ainsi possible de mettre en évidence le discours socioculturel propre à ce genre et plus spécifiquement aux femmes antillaises. Par ailleurs, cette recherche postule que l'appropriation des invariants romanesques et l'élaboration d'une visée didactique participent à l'intégration du roman sentimental antillais dans la sphère des littératures « sérieuses ». Enfin, ce mémoire défend l’idée selon laquelle l’écriture romanesque des auteures étudiées contribue au projet littéraire antillais de réappropriation identitaire.
The sentimental novel is one of the most read, translated and accessible literary genres. Considering its sales rating, its frivolous reputation seems to be a misleading one. Indeed, in the Caribbean, the overall presence and reception of the novels is an indicator of its phenomenal popularity. We consider that the following aspects of the Caribbean sentimental novel are the most significant ones. Firstly, we underline that the specificity of the narrative patterns of these novels is due to its singularity vis-à-vis the canonical sentimental novel. Secondly, these novels tend to create a very strong sense of nationhood for the readers which are generated by a careful depiction of the everyday life. These previous aspects allow us to underscore the fact that the studied novels interact with the Caribbean social-cultural discourse while insisting on the topic of the female condition. This research brings to light the fact that the appropriation of the novelistic schemes as well as the didactic within allows to consider the Caribbean sentimental novel as a part of the institutionally recognized literary productions. Finally, our essay demonstrates that the novels of these “female writers” contribute to the consolidation of the national identity.