Languages, Literatures, & Cultures
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Item Reading the Contemporary Body in the Works or Eduardo Lalo and Rita Indiana Hernández(2021) Lewis, Matthew C; Quintero-Herencia, Juan Carlos; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is interested in specificities of Caribbean bodies and the strategies that are used to perform, imagine, and make sensible the textual body so that it may be read through archipelagic contexts. I posit that the multi-disciplinary works of Dominican Rita Indiana Hernández (Santo Domingo 1977) and Puerto Rican Eduardo Lalo (Cuba 1960) turn a critical and creative eye to the corporealities that have been obscured and overshadowed by exotified, mainstream, and normative bodies and their representation. I argue that we tell stories with our bodies, and, likewise, the body is a text to be performed, read and made sensible. However, what we understand for the body—its capabilities and its limits—is a direct product of how these narratives have been politically and socially constructed, appropriated, and implemented in hegemonic discourses. My intervention lies questioning what narratives and images or the body are produced and privileged in these texts: how do these corporealities become sensible and make sense of the other bodies around them? What are the potential corporeal poetics and politics that may tie these texts together? By looking at the representation of anonymous bodies, the creation of Puerto Rican body-images, and the Dominican bodies situated within primal soundscapes, I suggest that these specific texts break with both preconceived and prescribed notions of a “Caribbean identity” and what it may mean to be Caribbean. This dissertation aims to interrogate the limits of hegemonic discourses of nationality and history by engaging with the ways in which the texts of Hernández and Lalo perform their own relationship to the contemporary, always crossing and challenging limits, imagining transitive bodies in constant motion, and implementing diverse strategies to produce and inhabit contemporary intervals that fiercely reject fixed and prescriptive notions of what a Caribbean body is, or of what it is capable.Item DE LA LITTÉRATURE UNIVERSALISTE SENGHORIENNE AU TOUT-MONDE DE GLISSANT: MÉTISSAGE ET DIALOGUE DES CULTURES DANS L’ÉCRITURE DE FATOU DIOME, ALAIN MABANCKOU, GASTON KELMAN ET AMINATA SOW FALL(2018) DIENE, Khady; Orlando, Valérie; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis focuses on how Senghorian universalism has influenced the world-views of contemporary mondial authors as well as Glissant’s concept of Tout-Monde. After reading the works of contemporary authors as Fatou Diome, Alain Mabanckou, Gaston Kelman and Aminata Sow Fall, we realized that their main themes as Métissage and Dialogue des cultures echo Senghor’s Civilisation de l’Universel. We also examine how le voyage, with its relation to globalization, influences or not these authors’ vision, as well as their writing and discourse about the universal ideas on the human condition. The objective of this thesis is to put in conversation Senghor’s Civilisation de l’Universel with contemporary works and to show through our literary and theorethical analysis that Senghorian universalism is atemporal.Item ¿A QUÉ SABE LA ESCRITURA?: FIGURACIONES DEL SABOR EN LA ESCRITURA DE LA COMIDA A TRAVÉS DE COCINA CRIOLLA DE CARMEN ABOY VALLDEJULI, LOS CINCO SENTIDOS DE TOMÁS BLANCO Y LAS COMIDAS PROFUNDAS DE ANTONIO JOSÉ PONTE(2017) Ocasio, Monica Ocasio; Quintero-Herencia, Juan Carlos; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis traces the relation between food and the double meaning of saborear: simultaneously flavor and savor, as a means of thinking about the production of a culinary image that reproduces and partakes of a specific sensible life. The sensible, in this thesis, is approached from what Emanuele Coccia proposes in his book, Sensible life: A Micro-onthology of the Image, as: “the Being of forms when they are outside, in exile from their proper place” (21). I interpret el sabor (flavor) as the moment from which food is imagined, taken out of its “place” (be that a recipe or a prepared dish) by some writing and we begin associating and producing new images, starting with the tongue, what is heard, smelled, and remembered. This thesis will look specifically at Carmen Aboy Valldejuli’s Cocina Criolla (1954), Tomás Blanco’s Los cinco sentidos (1955), and Antonio José Ponte’s Las comidas profundas (1997) and how the saborear leads to new understandings of the culinary image.Item The Drama of History: Representation and Revolutionaries in Haitian Theater, 1818-1907(2016) Dize, Nathan Hobson; Orlando, Valérie K; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Since the beginning of the Haitian theatrical tradition there has been an ineluctable dedication to the representation of Haitian history on stage. Given the rich theatrical archive about Haiti throughout the world, this study considers operas and plays written solely by Haitian playwrights. By delving into the works of Juste Chanlatte, Massillon Coicou, and Vendenesse Ducasse this study proposes a re-reading of Haitian theater that considers the stage as an innovative site for contesting negative and clichéd representations of the Haitian Revolution and its revolutionary leadership. A genre long mired in accusations of mimicking European literary forms, this study proposes a reevaluation of Haitian theater and its literary origins.Item Escritura, derecho y esclavitud: Francisco José de Jaca ante el nomos colonial(2013) Moreno-Orama, Rebeca; Merediz, Eyda M.; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation concentrates on the relationship between law, literature, and slavery in the Hispanic Caribbean of the Early Modern Period. My analysis is based on two letters and a treatise, Resolución sobre la libertad de los negros y sus originarios, en estado de paganos y después ya cristianos (1681), that were written by Capuchin friar Francisco José de Jaca, while he was serving as a missionary in the Caribbean region. His writings set the stage for a discussion of how Spanish hegemonic legal thinking is challenged and redefined from an alternative transatlantic narrative. The concept of nomos colonial that I introduce in this dissertation denotes the symbolic normative space originated by the legal justifications of the Spanish conquest and colonization. Through the exploration of the nomos colonial, my project focuses on how the rhetoric of law served simultaneously as a discursive practice of imperial domination and of cultural resistance. By reclaiming the aesthetic and conceptual originality of Francisco José de Jaca, a neglected author who demonstrated the illegality of Amerindian and African slavery, the dissertation reveals the epistemological shift produced to (re)accommodate the colonial subjects within the nomos colonial. By situating Jaca's contributions in a counter-hegemonic legal corpus that dates back to Antón de Montesinos and Bartolomé de Las Casas, the research re-envisions the ideological debates about slavery in the 16th and 17th centuries. Ultimately, my goal is to reconsider some foundational fictions of the Caribbean world--Amerindian legal status, slavery, and Black subjectivity--by underscoring the relevance of an intellectual whose discourse was constructed from the tension between the Spanish legal tradition and the colonial experience.