English Theses and Dissertations
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Item Occasions for Reading: Literary Encounters and the Making of the West Indies(2011) Esprit, Schuyler Kirshten; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"Occasions for Reading" argues for a new methodology of postcolonial reading that traces the origins of Anglophone Caribbean literary history and redirects the routes of West Indian literary production and canon formation. Historically, West Indian writers have sought an "ideal" reader of their work, though the definition and depiction of that ideal reader have varied. Anglophone Caribbean authors' own relationships to the act of reading and to the influence of reading on their own and on their characters' identity formation also direct or re-direct nation and canon formation. By engaging postcolonial theory, reader-response theory, post-structuralism, and reception studies, the dissertation investigates the production of the reader in and of Caribbean literary texts and of the social spaces in which they circulate. This dissertation situates the act of reading at the core of colonial and postcolonial representations of the Anglophone Caribbean and offers the culture of reception as a mode through which the geography of the West Indies is implicated in connecting West Indian people and identities across the diaspora. Acts and scenes of reading in West Indian novels produce a critique of Imperial knowledge production and illustrate how Caribbean subjects transform the intellectual, psychological or political meanings derived from reading colonial texts into a postcolonial epistemology. Such transformations provoke a range of consequences for these character-readers who must either leave the Caribbean region or continue to stake out their legitimacy and rootedness. Reading prompts characters' transgressions or resistance against persistent political, aesthetic or cultural narratives of colonialism historically informing Caribbean identity. By extension, characters' engagements with reading reveal twentieth-century West Indian authors' preoccupations with and resistance to colonial ontology. Issues of race, class, and gender influence the acts and scenes of reading in canonical West Indian novels analyzed in this study, including C.L.R. James's Minty Alley, V.S. Naipaul's The Mystic Masseur, Phyllis Shand Allfrey's The Orchid House, Michelle Cliff's Abeng and Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John. Following the historiography of the function of the reader in West Indian novels, the dissertation contends with contemporary concerns, in the late twentieth and into the twenty-first century, about where and how novels on the Caribbean experience are read, particularly by non-academic reading publics. Significant moments of literary reception in the U.K. and reception culture of Caribbean literature in the United States allow for a focus on contemporary novels and memoirs including Andrea Levy's Small Island and Jamaica Kincaid's My Brother. In an examination of how writers such as Kincaid and Edwidge Danticat have responded to the readers who encounter and assess their work, I critique apparent conflations of Caribbean literature, Caribbean geography or landscape, and Caribbean identity. Slippages in understanding the differences and boundaries between these concepts - literature, geography, and identity - in reading practices warrant a more methodological view of the impact of reading and reception on Caribbean literary history and its global reach. While representations of readers within the Caribbean space reveal a desire for a distinct origin and rootedness in the Caribbean landscape, migrant writers redefine the legacy and relevance of Caribbean literature through a discourse of emotion without boundaries or frontiers. As a whole, this dissertation challenges the dominant view of primarily political origins of postcolonial Caribbean literature, upholding its less recognized genealogy in intellectual and aesthetic discourses.Item Constructions of Violent Jamaican Masculinity in Film and Literature(2008-07-28) Harewood, Gia; Collins, Merle; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Greg Dimitriadis and Cameron McCarthy sketch out what they see as an emergent postcolonial aesthetic percolating in the postcolonial artist's imagination. According to their analysis, postcolonial artists make meaning in their work through three critical motifs that help shape this aesthetic: "counterhegemonic representation, double or triple coding, and emancipatory or utopic visions" (19, italics in original). Counterhegemonic representation "rework[s] the center-versus-periphery distinction . . . to look beyond its strictures to new histories, new discourses, new ways of being" (24). Double coding combines "two or more fields of reference or idiom in any given work" pulling images from places such as "the East and the West, the first world and the Third, the colonial master and the slave" (26). And utopic visions are about "imagining possibility even when faced with impossible barriers" (30). My project is fundamentally interested in constructing healthy (masculine) identities and its arguments are ultimately guided by their first and third motifs. Using feminist theory, masculinity studies, cultural studies and postcolonial theory, I focus on the representation of black Jamaican men as violent criminal beings in three films (The Harder They Come, Third World Cop and Shottas), two novels (The Harder They Come and For Nothing at All) and one ethnographic travelogue (Born Fi' Dead). I argue that "real/reel" Jamaican masculinity is ultimately connected to gun violence and the most popular films out of Jamaica over the past thirty years only perpetuate this image. While not the only source for role models, visual images play a significant role in the lives of young men (and women) who are trying to live up to social standards of masculinity. With limited access to social mobility, they often emulate the shotta (gangster) glory that they see sparkling on the screen. Through close readings of these texts, I show how hegemonic masculinity is reinforced and reveal that non-violent models of masculinity do exist, despite being overshadowed by violent "heroes." I call for that "utopic vision," to excavate the vulnerable and intervene on behalf of peace to help young men and boys find alternative models of masculinity and ultimately create sustainable communities.Item Cartographic Memories and Geographies of Pain: Bodily Representations in Caribbean Women's Art(2006-11-08) Wallace, Belinda Deneen; Collins, Merle; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Definitely, this dissertation's central intellectual and political aims are rooted in a guiding principle of Caribbean womanhood; and, with black women's bodies located at the center, the goal of this study is to provide new alternatives to understanding "writing the body" by looking to Caribbean women's cultural products as sites of theory formation. The artists and the works selected for this study demonstrate an awareness of the need for a re-evaluation of the metaphor of writing the body which takes into account the specificities of race, ethnicity and nationality. To that end, this study focuses on texts and performances by Caribbean women in order to examine the development of a Caribbean feminist consciousness and its ability to not only convey but also legitimate Caribbean female perspectives and experiences. Dionne Brand, Edwidge Danticat, Marion Hall, Joan Riley and Myriam Warner-Vieyra provide us with an opportunity to trace the processes through which Caribbean women artists write their own bodies and how those bodies can be used to explore larger issues around identity, geography and history. In the music and performances of Marion Hall this project looks closely at the intricacies that comprise women's sexuality, sexual autonomy and sexual identity beyond their objectification as sexual objects for men. In Warner-Vierya's Juletane, Riley's The Unbelonging and Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory, the study examines the metropolis as a source of contamination that forces us to recognize madness as a socio-cultural and historical construct with gender specific consequences. Finally, the study concludes with Danticat's The Farming of Bones and Brand's In Another Place, Not Here, where it investigates literary representations of the female body as a representative text that disrupts the official narrative and brings forth a uniquely female historical subjectivity.Item Textual Trespassing: Tracking the Native Informant in Literatures of the Americas(2004-11-02) Shemak, April A.; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation reframes notions of two disparate fields of study--postcolonial and U.S. ethnic studies--through an analysis of contemporary narratives located in the Caribbean, Central America and the United States. My choice of texts is dictated by their multiple locations, allowing me to consider postcolonial and ethnic studies as simultaneous formations. Throughout the dissertation I use the trope of trespassing in its various connotations to explore how these narratives represent native spaces, migration and U.S. spatial formations. Furthermore, I explore the manner in which testimonio surfaces as a narrative device in several of the texts. I establish the parameters of my project by describing the disciplines and theoretical discourses with which I engage. I argue that it is necessary to expand the boundaries of U.S. ethnic literature to include the literatures of the Americas. Furthermore, I also consider the implications of the trope of trespassing vis-à-vis my own subject position my own subject position and the narratives I analyze. Chapter two investigates the manner in which, despite contemporary theoretical and cultural critiques of essentialism, one continues to sense a reverence for sacrosanct notions of authenticity, origins, and nativism in contemporary narratives. I explore these themes as they occur in texts from Jamaica, Guyana and Martinique and consider how these novels complicate the alignment of indigeneity with essentialism through their use of postmodern narrative tactics. In chapter three, I shift my investigation to Haitian and Cuban narratives of migration and the manner in which testimony, when it is linked to migration, becomes a means of trespassing especially for refugees who must constructing the postcolonial native space as “corrupt” as they attempt to gain political asylum in the United States. I argue that such texts as Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak! and Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban reflect discourses of disease as a way of representing the “unhealthy” relationships between the U.S. and Haiti and Cuba. Chapter four charts the movement of the native informant from the postcolonial native locale to the ethnic immigrant space. I use Gayatri Spivak’s critique of the postcolonial critic as “New Immigrant-native informant” as an analytical frame for addressing the ways in which Dominican American writers adopt or reject the role of native informant in the novels (for example, Julia Alvarez, Loida Maritza Perez and Nelly Rosario). Chapter five reflects a convergence of postcolonial and ethnic American concerns as it explores the implications of trespassing and testimony in narratives that represent transnational labor practices. I juxtapose the 1991 U.S. Congressional Hearings which address the plight of Haitian sugarcane cutters in the Dominican Republic through an appropriation of testimonial discourse with the subjective representations of migrant workers in the novels of Edwidge Danticat and Francisco Goldman.