480 p., This dissertation examines the role of the Haitian Revolution and Haiti's national history in the construction of Black Internationalism and Black Atlantic intellectual culture in the first half of the twentieth century. The author argues for the centrality of Haiti in the genesis of Black internationalism, contending that revolutionary Haiti played a major place in Black Atlantic thought and culture in the time covered. Suggests viewing the dynamics between the Harlem Renaissance, Haitian Indigenism, and Negrtude and key writers and intellectuals in terms of interpenetration, interindepedence, and mutual reciprocity and collaboration.
335 p., A central premise of this project is that individuals and communities perceive the significance of history differently depending on their historical conditions. Indeed, much of the emphasis on memory studies in the last two decades has been informed by an awareness of changing perspectives on the past. Thus, given its focus on black peoples in the United States and the Caribbean, this dissertation aims to illuminate an emergent historical consciousness in the African Diaspora in the late 20th century. This dissertation is divided into two sections. In Part I, "Ancestors: Exploring Historical Inheritances," I analyze Maryse Conde's Les derniers rois mages (1993) and Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco (1993) as they interrogate the concept of familial lineage and query the significance of the past imagined as an inheritance. Whereas Chamoiseau questions the ability of written history to represent memory and experience, Conde empties the idea of heritage of all significance as new relationships to the past come to the fore. In Part II, "New Birth: Exploring Discourses of Reproduction," I focus on Gayl Jones' Corregidora (1975) and Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982) as they reveal the limitations of genealogical discourse. By creating their pasts and imagining their heritage, the characters in these texts challenge the primacy of lineage as they point toward other, more viable networks of community and belonging.
159 p., Metamorphic literatures is both the identification of a cohesive group of texts, as well as the assertion that these particular texts are part of a global literary movement. The literatures coming out of this movement fundamentally seek to (1) resist colonization and enslavement, (2) re-vision history and resurface figures of redress, and (3) reimagine gender, sexualities, and the queer diasporic body. The tropes of this new literary movement that are expanded upon in the following work will organize the language, characteristics, and outlines of this movement of contemporary diasporic writers.
205 p., Analyzes the poetry of the African American Langston Hughes and the Jamaican Louise Bennett during the 1940s. Through an examination of the unique similarities of their poetic projects, namely their engagement of performance to build their audiences, their experiments with poetic personae to represent vernacular social voices, their doubleness as national and transnational figures, their circulation of poetry in radio and print journalism and their use of poetry as pedagogy to promote reading, this dissertation establishes a new perspective on the role of poetry in decolonizing language practices. While Hughes and Bennett are often celebrated for their representation of oral language and folk culture, this project reframes these critical discussions by drawing attention to how they engage performance to foster an embodied form of reading that draws on Creole knowledge systems.
