English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item PROTEAN GODS: A RETELLING OF HISPANIOLA’S STORY THROUGH THE MAROON(2018) Rivera, Ines Pastora; Ontiveros, Randy; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation argues that an exploration of the maroon, or the runaway slave, in literature can be a means to acknowledging the too-often-repressed historical, political, and cultural connections between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and can also help us uncover more accurate and less restrictive versions of Hispaniola’s story. Hispaniola’s story is often told through the fatal-conflict narrative, reducing Haitian-Dominican relations to an unending cockfight. The fatal-conflict narrative paints the Dominican Republic and Haiti as two nations fated to regard one another as ultimate, foreign archenemies,destined to be in total conflict. It also paints the Dominican Republic and Haiti as two nations whose fight for Hispaniola and for the preservation of their respective cultures is fatal. The formation of the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti has bolstered the fatal-conflict narrative, silencing a shared history of resistance and cross-pollination. My work extends and contributes to existing scholarship by uncovering instances of cooperation and collaboration that suggest alternative views of a united island and that complicate contemporary political and social realities in the Dominican Republic. Rather than reaffirming a discourse of national difference through a focus on the border, I focus on the maroon as a protean figure who undoes the fatal-conflict narrative. I argue that these change agents, the maroons, anchor the island in what Cedric Robinson calls the Black Radical Tradition, the evolving resistance of African people to oppression. Maroon figures also reveal different angles to Hispaniola’s story through their forms of resistance and penchant for metamorphoses. I also examine twentieth and twenty-first century maroons found in Dominican and Dominican American literature. Like their counterparts from the past, modern-day maroons take flight, resist forms of enslavement and oppression, and undergo transformations that challenge conventional ways of thinking about Haitian-Dominican relations and the island of Hispaniola. Writers from the Dominican diaspora—among them Angie Cruz, Junot Díaz, and Nelly Rosario—have played a pivotal role in interrogating history, and more specifically, memories of violence and the repercussions associated with migration. Not only does this interrogation rewrite history, but it offers a means of forging a new, fuller story that erodes the border and expands the island’s boundaries, all the while magnifying the role of the Black Freedom struggle in the making of a whole Hispaniola.Item THE TRAUMA OF THE CARIBBEAN TEXT: ETHICS AND PROBLEMS OF VICTIMIZERS AND VICTIMS, AUTHORS AND READERS(2016) Metz, Jeremy; Nunes, Zita; Orlando, Valerie; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Since the early 1990s, trauma theory has acquired paradigmatic status as a methodology for studying literary representations of victims of various forms of violence, oppression, and social upheavals. However, with a genealogical foundation in Freud and an empirical basis in the Holocaust, trauma studies have been Eurocentric in orientation. My project seeks to “decolonize” trauma by bringing contemporary psychological and cultural trauma theory to bear on postwar Caribbean literature. Conversely, I use the insights provided by my investigation to reassess certain of the central tenets of trauma theory. I argue that in canonical Caribbean trauma texts, including Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, and Mary Chauvet’s Amour, Colère et Folie [Love, Anger, Madness], characters may be understood best as positioned at the intersection of psychological and cultural trauma theories. Victims of traumatic violence may be members of groups that have perpetrated violence on others; and perpetrators of violence may identify with groups that have been historically victimized. Viewing characters along a psychological trauma axis as individuals, and a cultural trauma axis as members of collectivities with which they identify, opens a range of new intepretive possibilities, and illuminates the manner in which critics respond to trauma texts and to each other. Trauma literature places extraordinary demands on writers and readers who, through empathetic identification with victims, are exposed to potentially destabilizing representations of victimization that transmit something of the experience of the original trauma. I propose a reading practice for Caribbean trauma literature that urges critical readers to maintain an ethical awareness of their own responses to scenes of traumatic violence so as to read the characters of both victims and perpetrators in their full complexity. This work includes an extended case study of the literature that emerged from the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, supplemented by interviews of prominent Haitian authors that I conducted in Port-au-Prince in 2012-2013. Haitian earthquake texts and testimony tend to undermine significant Freudian-derived assumptions of modern trauma theory, including the doctrine of “unspeakability.” I sought in my readings of Haitian earthquake literature to identify a template of common thematic elements and distinct discursive modes that characterize these writings.Item Beastgirl(2015) Acevedo, Elizabeth; Weiner, Joshua; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Beastgirl is a collection of poems that respond to the necessity of myths. Sectioned into two parts, part I aims to examine how colonialism and patriarchy collide and intersect. From bio-myths to better known myths about Columbus and the Caribbean, the speaker elevates the folkloric, the domestic, and the island imaginary as imperative pieces of understanding the self. In part II, the speaker maps herself onto a transnational experience and aims to transport the reader to the grit and grime of urban living. The public nature of those city poems are paired alongside intimate poems depicting the speaker's brother suffering from schizophrenia.Item "Nothing About the Rape:" Generative Silencing in Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber(2014) Webb, Calvin Allan; Wong, Edlie; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project, which focuses on Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber, explores the relationship between storytelling, witnessing, and lived experience. By interrogating the intersection of black feminism, speculative fiction, and slave narratives in the backdrop of the Haitian Revolution, Hopkinson's work shows that some silencing can be constructive, even essential, for survival.Item UNHOMELY STIRRINGS: REPRESENTATIONS OF INDENTURESHIP IN INDO-CARIBBEAN LITERATURE FROM 1960 TO THE PRESENT(2014) Baksh, Anita; Collins, Merle; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation investigates the ways in which East Indian Caribbean (Indo-Caribbean) writers negotiate history, identity, and belonging. Nineteenth-century government officials and plantation owners described Indian indentureship (1838-1917) in the British West Indies as a contractual system of employment implemented after abolition and as a civilizing mechanism aimed at reforming heathen laborers. Challenging these accounts, historians have shown that the system was a new mode of exploitation. Colonial administrators used coercive tactics to control workers and implemented strategic laws to confine Indians to the plantation. These policies constructed Indians as foreigners and interlopers in colonial society, perceptions that have significantly impacted the formation of Indo-Caribbean subjectivities and Indo-Caribbean claims to postcolonial citizenship in the region. Reading both canonical and lesser known texts, my project argues that Indo-Caribbean writers frequently engage with indentureship as a means to come to terms with this history of oppression and as a way to contest their elision in Anglophone Caribbean culture more widely. Drawing on postcolonial theory, I examine works published from 1960 to the present by authors from Guyana and Trinidad, countries where Indians constitute a significant portion of the population. My analysis begins in the 1960s because it was at this time that literary and political debates began to focus on decolonization and on defining a culture distinct from Britain. Given that Indian indentures were unable to record their own experiences, their perspectives are largely omitted from the Caribbean historiography. Moreover, as Indians moved off the plantation and gained socio-economic mobility, they often viewed indenture as a shameful part of their heritage that was best forgotten. By examining V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas, Peter Kempadoo's Guyana Boy, Harold Ladoo's No Pain Like This Body, Ramabai Espinet's The Swinging Bridge, the novels of Shani Mootoo, and the poetry of Rajkumari Singh, Rooplall Monar, and Mahadai Das, "Unhomely Stirrings" traces the processes by which indenture has been subjected to willful acts of forgetting within Indo-Caribbean communities and in larger national histories. These texts engage the ways in which the legacy of indentureship continues to shape the contemporary lives and identities of Indo-Caribbean people at home and in the diaspora.Item 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.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.