This paper explores the African Diaspora and the psychological, social, political, and economic effects of the Atlantic slave trade on people of African descent in the historical fiction text The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat and the travel narrative The Atlantic Sound by Caryl Phillips. By examining the complex history of the British and French slave trade and its later consequences in the twentieth century, this paper examines the connection between the evidence of displacement and the search for identity coupled with the idea of healing in regards to trauma suffered by the spirits of Danticats' and Phillips' characters symbols of those in the African Diaspora.
242 p., As a feminist approach which takes into consideration how gender collides with race, national origin, and class in the context of neo-colonial imperialisms, transnational feminist studies attempt to bridge the gap left by these theories that either look at gender or at race. This dissertation examines the work of Dionne Brand, Marlene Nourbese Philip, and Makeda Silvera in the light of these recent transnational feminist developments. By insisting on a fluid and multiply positioned self, these writers enact a transnational feminist identity that repudiates simplistic notions of gender oppression at the same time as it challenges masculinist notions of home.
276 p., A critical examination of Haitian migration and displacement in North America that engages both a theoretical and literary analysis of exile and diaspora as consequences of migration and displacement. Argues that Haitian writers in North America inscribe migration by troping exile and diaspora to speak of the predicament of displaced migratory subjects and their inevitable crossings of places, landscapes, borders, cultures, and nations. Analyzes three novels by Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat: Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), The Farming of Bones (1998), and the Dew Breaker (2004); and two novels by Haitian Canadian writer Myriam Chancy: Spirit of Haiti (2003) and The Scorpion's Claw (2005).
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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226 p., Investigates how these entrenched notions of paradise, which islands have traditionally represented metonymically, are contested in the works of four postcolonial authors: Jamaica Kincaid, Lawrence Scott, Romesh Gunesekera, and Jean Arasanayagam, from the island nations of the Caribbean and Sri Lanka.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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312 p., Argues for inclusion of more Afro-Hispanic poets in the Caribbean literary canon. This book offers an introductory overview of the literary tradition of Black writing in the Hispanic Caribbean. It also provides a survey of black poets.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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211 p., Surveying three novels written by writers of diasporic literature -- Zadie Smith's White Teeth, Jessica Hagedorns's Dogeaters, and Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven, the dissertation discusses how these novels function as narratives and provide cognitive maps which help us re-conceptualize social and political structures and women's places within them.
108 p., Investigate how contemporary fiction written by mixed race North American authors challenges theories of cultural and racial fluidity. Specifically looks at the works of Lawrence Hill, Shani Mootoo, and Danzy Senna, because their work uses similar conditions of hybridity in identity, through the lens of cultural performance. These authors represent my politics of an inclusionary mixed race theory by representing differences amongst themselves that resolve into a focus on language, as it reflects on mixed race literature.
