Browsing by Subject "Caribbean literature"
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Item Open Access Caribbean Iconographies of Cultural Nationalism: Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico(2020) Dulceany, Roger DavidCaribbean Iconographies of Cultural Nationalism: Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico traces a chronological evolution of images circulating between the Caribbean and the United States demonstrating the intersection of religion and politics. I argue that these representations constitute prime examples of the Caribbean struggle for decolonization and self-determination. I focus my investigation on select examples from three Antillian nations to theorize the iconophilic and affective dimensions of their corresponding cultural nationalisms, especially in relation to resisting colonialism and imperialism. From the Haitian Revolution to the first US occupation of Cuba to the current aftermath of Hurricane María in Puerto Rico, I examine the mechanisms of power relations at play in the region as understood through the lens of iconography and Caribbean thought. I accomplish this through an analysis of particular images and related texts, a foundational novel, a painting, a series of photographs and postcards, and contemporary public murals with the use of methodologies related to cultural and visual studies, Caribbean and decolonial thought, theories of affect and iconography, historical and archival analysis, and theologies of Afro-Caribbean religions.
Item Open Access Commandeering Aesop’s Bamboo Canon: A 19th Century Confederacy of Creole Fugitive Fables(2016) Patterson, Reginald DewightIn my thesis, “Commandeering Aesop’s Bamboo Canon: A 19th Century Confederacy of Creole Fugitive Fables,” I ask and answer the ‘Who? What? Where? When? Why?” of Creole Literature using the 19th century production of Aesopian fables as clues to resolve a set of linguistic, historical, literary, and geographical enigmas pertaining the ‘birth-place(s)’ of Creolophone Literatures in the Caribbean Sea, North and South America, as well as the Indian Ocean. Focusing on the fables in Martinique (1846), Reunion Island (1826), and Mauritius (1822), my thesis should read be as an attempt capture the links between these islands through the creation of a particular archive defined as a cartulary-chronicle, a diplomatic codex, or simply a map in which I chart and trace the flight of the founding documents relating to the lives of the individual authors, editors, and printers in order to illustrate the articulation of a formal and informal confederation that enabled the global and local institutional promotion of Creole Literature. While I integrate various genres and multi-polar networks between the authors of this 19th century canon comprised of sacred and secular texts such as proclamations, catechisms, and proverbs, the principle literary genre charted in my thesis are collections of fables inspired by French 17th century French Classical fabulist, Jean de la Fontaine. Often described as the ‘matrix’ of Creolophone Literature, these blues and fables constitute the base of the canon, and are usually described as either ‘translated,’ ‘adapted,’ and even ‘cross-dressed’ into Creole in all of the French Creolophone spaces. My documentation of their transnational sprouting offers proof of an opaque canonical formation of Creole popular literature. By constituting this archive, I emphasize the fact that despite 200 years of critical reception and major developments and discoveries on behalf of Creole language pedagogues, literary scholars, linguists, historians, librarians, archivist, and museum curators, up until now not only have none have curated this literature as a formal canon. I also offer new empirical evidence in order to try and solve the enigma of “How?” the fables materially circulated between the islands, and seek to come to terms with the anonymous nature of the texts, some of which were published under pseudonyms. I argue that part of the confusion on the part of scholars has been the result of being willfully taken by surprise or defrauded by the authors, or ‘bamboozled’ as I put it. The major paradigmatic shift in my thesis is that while I acknowledge La Fontaine as the base of this literary canon, I ultimately bypass him to trace the ancient literary genealogy of fables to the infamous Aesop the Phrygian, whose biography – the first of a slave in the history of the world – and subsequent use of fables reflects a ‘hidden transcript’ of ‘masked political critique’ between ‘master and slave classes’ in the 4th Century B.C.E. Greece.
This archive draws on, connects and critiques the methodologies of several disciplinary fields. I use post-colonial literary studies to map the literary genealogies Aesop; use a comparative historical approach to the abolitions of slavery in both the 19th century Caribbean and the Indian Ocean; and chart the early appearance of folk music in early colonial societies through Musicology and Performance Studies. Through the use of Sociolinguistics and theories of language revival, ecology, and change, I develop an approach of ‘reflexive Creolistics’ that I ultimately hope will offer new educational opportunities to Creole speakers. While it is my desire that this archive serves linguists, book collectors, and historians for further scientific inquiry into the innate international nature of Creole language, I also hope that this innovative material defense and illustration of Creole Literature will transform the consciousness of Creolophones (native and non-native) who too remain ‘bamboozled’ by the archive. My goal is to erase the ‘unthinkability’ of the existence of this ancient maritime creole literary canon from the collective cultural imaginary of readers around the globe.
Item Open Access Imagined Islands: A Caribbean Tidalectics(2012) Llenín-Figueroa, Carmen BeatrizImagined Islands: A Caribbean Tidalectics 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.
Imagined Islands' 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 tidalectics; (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 Imagined Islands 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 Utopia, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Charles Darwin's The Origin of the Species, and Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa. 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.
Imagined Islands' 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 Tiepolo's Hound, and Rodríguez Juliá's novel El espíritu de la luz. Chapter 3 turns to the insular coast, time, space, and the novels El siglo de las luces by Carpentier and The Fourth Century 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 Poetics of Relation and some of his poems from The Restless Earth. Finally, Imagined Islands' Coda points to some of the ripples this project produces for future study, and defends the urgent need to "live differently" the Caribbean archipelagoes.
Item Open Access Laboratorios-isla: Monstruos, enfermedades y farmacopeas literarias en el Caribe hispano(2018) Ugarte, Ana I.This dissertation examines how fiction from the 1950s to the present exposes the historical functioning of Caribbean territories as laboratories for political, economic, and scientific experimentation. Through close-readings of Puerto Rican and Cuban literary texts, I argue that the laboratory, as a biopolitical system of power legitimation, operates on the levels of knowledge, affect, and subjectivities. First, the authors I study denounce how medical and literary discourse intersect to create eugenic, homophobic, and patriarchal diagnoses, proposing instead counter-hegemonic forms of imagining (and experiencing) mental and physical health, corporeal difference, and healing processes. Second, the diverse works of fiction I examine revolve around the shared affect of fear, which is heightened through the anticipation of further testing. Ultimately, I show how the laboratory produces paradoxical forms of alterity for the test subjects—a method of trial and error relies on an othered subject who, at the same time, must be sufficiently similar to the experimenter in order to function as a reliable testing object. This investigation contributes to and opens up new interpretative frameworks for the fields of Caribbean and postcolonial studies by examining an understudied form of subalternity—i.e., the test subject—through a connection between literary genres, geographies, and historical periods, which are often explored in isolation. Chapters 2 and 3 identify several forms of monstrosity and illness in the narrative fictions of Virgilio Piñera and José Lezama Lima. I show how these authors foreground the monstrous body in order to problematize the cycles of political experimentation in Cuba, as well as the medical nature of the US occupation and interventionism in the first decades of the 20th century. Chapter 4 explores the narrative work of Puerto Rican-Dominican author Pedro Cabiya, proposing the category of “hypochondriac fiction,” which names an aesthetic space for the destabilization of biopolitics in the context of repeated medical experimentation on human beings in Puerto Rico. Chapter 5 looks into the work of Rafael Acevedo, José (Pepe) Liboy, and Jorge Enrique Lage. I address the role of paranoia in Cuban and Puerto Rican novels by revealing the counterintuitive transformation of science fiction—in many senses, the epitome of fantastic fabrications—into the ultimate guarantor of credibility. In the epilogue I explore the representation of healing processes in Mayra Santos Febres’ La amante de Gardel (2015).
Item Embargo Representations of Black Womanhood in Cuban Literature (1882-1976)(2024) Lopez Madrigal, Ofelia del CarmenThis dissertation examines how Black womanhood has been reinscribed and used in Cuban literature to articulate ideas of race and nation across different historical periods and literary genres. I argue that political and literary elites reproduced stereotypical images of Black women rooted in the nation’s history slavery and nationalist ideologies of blanqueamiento (whitening) and mestizaje (miscegenation), while Afro-Cuban female authors who assumed a Black and female perspective contested this legacy by challenging dominant ideas of nation, race, and gender, and attributing agency and historical participation to women of African descent. Through a close-reading of narrative, poetry, and journalism, I analyze the reproduction and evolution of constructions and representations of the mulata and mujer negra in six works that follow a progression of time as Cuba goes through different historical periods: Cecilia Valdés (1882), Motivos de Son (1930) Songoro Cosongo (1931), West Indies Ltd. (1937) Parajes de una época (1976), and Minerva: Revista quincenal dedicada a la mujer de color (1888-1889). This research contributes to the field of race and literary studies in Cuba and the Hispanic Caribbean by situating the male, patriarchal, and hegemonic perspective of canonical authors in dialogue with the perspective of Afro-Cuban women authors who claimed their own voice as feminine and black. This subaltern perspective has been neglected in relation to the historical periods, literary genres, and canonical authors that I address in this dissertation, which scholars, until now, have solely analyzed in isolation. Chapter one studies the relationship between nation and black femininity in Cirilo Villaverde's novel Cecilia Valdés. I argue that the figure of the mulata fictionally recreates the rejection of racial heterogeneity, at a moment in the national-building process when reformistas and Creoles imagined a white Cuba free of the “black threat,” the African descendant population, prior to the rise of mestizaje as a nationalist discourse. Chapter two studies the figures of the mulata and the mujer negra in Nicolás Guillén’s Afrocubanist poetry collections, Motivos de Son, Sóngoro cosongo, and West Indies Ltd. I argue that the figures of the mulata and the mujer negra in Guillén’s poetry reproduce nineteenth-century portrayals of Black women by white and male writers embedded in the ideology of the mestizo nation. Chapter three examines the magazine Minerva: Revista quincenal dedicada a la mujer de color, and the poem “Mujer negra” by Nancy Morejón. I argue that the Black women writers of Minerva and Morejón’s poetry not only challenge long-standing patriarchal constructions of Black womanhood rooted in colonialism and enslavement, but attribute to Afro-Cuban women an active and leading role in the nation. While Minerva’s post-abolition texts re-imagine Black female identities outside of the prescribed roles of laborer and concubine, the protagonist of Morejón’s poem powerfully imagines an Afro-feminine subject who recovers lost memories of the African diaspora and repositions Black women from the margins to the very center of Cuban history.
Item Open Access Toxic Narratives: the Role of Poisoning in Contemporary Caribbean Novels(2024) Vargas, LauraThis dissertation explores the concept of toxicity through the lens of literature. It takes the Plantationocene on the Hispanophone, Francophone, and Creolophone Caribbean experiences as the starting point to understand how the period and location circumstances affect the narratives we create around biological exposure to toxins and ideas of immunity and biological harm. Through the analysis of six contemporary novels, drawing from health humanities, biopolitics, and ecocriticism, it offers an understanding of what toxicity entails in contemporary imaginaries of the Caribbean and what kind of narratives are born from the need to make sense of an existence surrounded by discourse about climate collapse, pandemics, and extinction. The three chapters delve into intoxication in sacred spaces, the visual politics of infection using the zombie trope, and the role of storytelling in the transmission of abstract and material toxicity. They show how authors of this era offer alternative narratives of human existence in our current context that stray away from conservationist and purist ideas of ecology and planetary balance. The study aims to enhance our understanding of the centrality of toxicity in the Plantationocene context as well as the counterplantation practices that arise as alternatives for survival, contributing valuable insights into our post-pandemic world.