Spectacular Chaos: The Future of Folklore in Caribbean Fiction

Abstract

“Spectacular Chaos: The Future of Folklore in Caribbean Fiction,” considers the Caribbean as a transcendent site of inquiry: a critical, geographical, cultural, and intellectual space in the fraught and contradictory forging of modernity. Rather than defining a linear continuum between the folk (past) and speculative futures, my dissertation takes a ‘chaotic’ approach, seeing folkloric figures as circuitously moving through space and time, and perfectly placed, therefore, to help to understand and explain the complicated history of this region. I develop a multilingual, pan-Caribbean theoretical framework, centering writers whose work is often submerged within larger Latin American and North American contexts. My use of “chaos” is drawn from chaos theory as understood by three Caribbean writers writing from different language traditions (Martinican Edouard Glissant, Guyanese Wilson Harris and Cuban Antonio Benítez-Rojo), in order to think about small size as being the essential lens through which we may imagine an interconnected global history and work towards a planetary-minded ecological future. I add to this theory (and therefore distinguish my work from archipelagic thought, tidalectics, and even fractals) by specifically investigating texts which draw on the ‘spectacular’, a way of understanding the folkloric traditions and supernatural elements in Caribbean literatures through the lens of performance (the spectacle) as well as through imagination.In Chapter One, through readings of Kamau Brathwaite’s early poetic trilogy The Arrivants and later “documentarian song” Trench town Rock, and Andrew Salkey’s Anancy’s Score and Anancy, Traveller, I theorize the West-African turned Caribbean Anansi the Spider God and his web as a metaphor for the enduring nature of an interconnected Caribbean folk aesthetic that emerges in twentieth century Caribbean fiction. Chapter Two considers the role of fractals and palimpsests, two web-like patterns that recur in Wilson Harris’ archive, Erna Brodber’s Nothing’s Mat and M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! I am particularly concerned with process and the making of writing—drawn from my own interest as a writer and critic. I focus on process: how behavioral science studies of spiders show that the process of web-weaving involves errors introduced into the fractal elements that repeat, but that can be corrected and ultimately re-framed/transformed by the spider. In Chapter Three, I discuss Nalo Hopkinson’s model of intertwining Caribbean and African Diaspora folklore with speculative fiction tropes, demonstrating her use of the anthology in order to weave herself into a Caribbean literary tradition. In Chapter Four, I consider Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ mythopoetic triptych as an act of radical citation and ancestral lineage with other Black Caribbean feminist writers. I conclude with a meditation on Anansi in the 21st century and beyond. Does he linger in the writing of someone like Marlon James, or in the tricksterish machinations of a celebrated figure like Usain Bolt? What about for myself, a Caribbean woman writer, when Anansi is often gendered as male? My dissertation shows that spectacular chaos radiates through an interconnected mesh network of Caribbean writers and I argue for a new metaphor; away from the butterfly effect, and towards a spider’s web of interconnected relations.