English Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766

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On the B-Side: A Dub Approach to Defining a Caribbean Literary Identity in the Contemporary Diaspora
(2013) Semaj, Isis Nailah; Collins, Merle; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
United under an aesthetics of dub and utilizing both literary critique and social and musical historiography, this dissertation analyzes Caribbean texts that acknowledge a particular kind of identification that occurs in the diaspora and has implications, too, for the study of the Caribbean subject at home in the region. Inspired by dub music, which developed out of the distinct socio-political climate of newly independent Jamaica as a music juxtaposing the capital city's street violence with new nation optimism, the dub aesthetic finds application in Caribbean literary texts written within the undefined subjective space between dislocation from home and late twentieth and early twenty-first century globalism. Thus, while paying respect to Derek Walcott's pronouncement that colonialism is the common ground of the New World, this dub approach moves beyond a joint postcolonial identification to an interrogation of the overlapping histories and social realities present in the contemporary Caribbean diaspora.