Assuming that in one way or another Latin American literature deals with the shock caused by the conquest and colonization of the New World, my dissertation reads this literature by paying special attention to texts that by undermining Western hegemonic logics, successfully perform decolonization. It is in the process of drawing this alternative map for reading Latin American literatures, that I have realized the extent to which memory becomes a key factor in decolonizing literary projects. It is a special configuration of memory that keeps literature loyal to the lettered citys principles, turning it into a colonizing device. In that regard, it is assumed that the only way to deal with otherness is to wipe out any sign of difference that may eventually disturb hegemonic discourses. Memory, however, can also work in a different direction, uncovering alliances between writing and power, and by so doing confronting dominant narratives with other rationalities. In this sense, memory proves to be strongly linked to the creation, reproduction, updating and deconstruction of cultural imaginaries. Understood as a tool of decolonization, memory opens the way to alternative epistemologies. Trying to identify epistemological differences between projects of decolonization based on specific uses of memory, I have selected a body of texts produced in a diverse set of geopolitical areas. First, I concentrate on literary works emerged from locations where a massive indigenous population proactively affects the formation of a given national culture, producing the emergence of subjectivities and forms of socialization other than those legitimized by cultural and historical elites. In a second approach, I examine how a similar process takes place in zones with reduced indigenous settlements and/or where Indians have largely been made invisible by national power centers. In these cases, literature achieves a decolonizing performance by contaminating itself with the same cultural logics that the elites seek to isolate. In this way, nations that imagine themselves as clean of the Indian, are nevertheless able to produce a literature that unexpectedly questions hegemonic discourses by indirectly making connections with indigenous rationalities.

The dissertation concerns the construction of Stalins White Sea-Baltic Canal (Belomorsko-Baltiskii Kanal imeni Stalina), one of the most significant and infamous forced-labor projects of Soviet Russia. In just twenty months from 1931-1933, political and criminal prisoners built a 227-kilometer-long canal in extreme environmental conditions, without the help of any modern equipment. This early Gulag project differed greatly from others in its broad use of art and creativity as a motivational and propagandistic tool. Prisoners performed in agitbrigady (agitational brigades), participated in camp-wide competitions of poetry and prose, worked as journalists at the camp newspaper Perekovka, and attended theatrical performances completely produced by fellow prisoners. Art, in turn, not only served as entertainment but also had the capacity to transform human beings through the ideological process of perekvovka (re-forging), which supposedly re-fashioned wayward criminals into productive members of Soviet society. Through extensive use of archival documents, the dissertation aims to highlight the experience of criminal prisoners in the Gulag, a long understudied demographic of the Soviet prison camp system. Self and society were both re-created at the Belomorkanal with the help of aesthetic products, and what was begun as a laboratory for Soviet culture becomes a utopian vision. This dystopian utopia was riddled by the paradoxes surrounding itin an environment of supposed re-birth and creation there was ubiquitous death and destruction. This explains the important roles that collage, montage, and assemblage play as artistic styles and metaphorical concepts. Collage exemplifies the shredding of the world in order to create a new, unified whole; montage in film and photography promises the creation of non-existentand idealizedworlds; assemblage, in its three-dimensionality, is used in contemporary artworks about the Canal and can be understood metaphorically, with the Canals various bits of lock, dam, and dike pieced together and subsequently stitched with other waterways. From the outset, the significance of the Belomorkanal was seen within the larger industrial context of Stalins first Five-Year Plan, and the project has important cultural significance not only for the history of the Gulag but also for the study of Stalinism and the Soviet Union as a whole.

This dissertation takes as its primary task the evaluation of a conflict of paradigms in Russian philosophical thought in the past decade. If until the early nineties Russian philosophers were often guilty of uncritically attributing to their domestic philosophy a set of characteristics that fell along the lines of a religious/secular binary (e.g. literary vs. analytic; continuous vs. ruptured), in recent years the same scholarship is moving away from the nineteenth-century model of philosophy as a path or special mission, as it has been called by Konstantin Aksakov, Aleksei Khomiakov, Ivan Kireevskii, and later, Nikolai Berdiaev, among others. I begin in the first chapter by throwing light on these binary assumptions, with the goal of revealing them to be of decreasing value in the past decade, in that they have contributed to the further crystallization of the essentializing ascriptions of the romanticized Orthodox narrative. In the second chapter I then trace the religious paradigm to the twenty-first century, where it continues to thrive in the often criticized sub-departments of the History of Russian Philosophy. Yet, if the religious narrative has historically been the dominating approach, I argue in chapters three and four that a number of trends have emerged that seek to discredit it, many of which appeal to Western ideals of professionalism while condemning the tradition of the Russian intelligentsia. For these critics, the goal is often not to limit through exceptionalist claims in the style of ninetieth-century religious philosophy, but to open up a discursive field (from both outside and within the religious tradition) in which connections are made between philosophy in Russia and the rest of the world. Thus, the title Between Philosophies touches on the two main observations of this work: 1) that much of philosophical production in Russia remains stratified over the issue of religious thought; and 2) that despite great strides to demystify philosophy in the twentieth century, there remains an often monolithic approach to the discipline, whereby responses to the query What is contemporary Russian philosophy? either delineate a rigid set of requirements or deny the existence of the tradition altogether.

This dissertation explores the figure of the hero in Latin American popular culture from a postcolonial-subalternist perspective. In the West, the conventional hero functions as a role model, defends principles of justice and order, and symbolically represents the state or at least the status quo. But what happens whenand wherethe state is seen as unfair instead of just, weak instead of strong, and dangerous instead of benevolent? Is the hero different in Latin America, a marginal region in the world system living a heterogeneous modernity, as compared with the hero of a central, hegemonic power? Examining a number of real-life and fictional charactersfrom superheroes to criminalsthis dissertation aims to understand the role these icons play in the historical processes of nation building, hegemonic domination, and subaltern resistance throughout the region. The first section deals with two hugely popular Mexican superheroes: Santo el Enmascarado de Plata and Chapulín Colorado. Santo is a straightforward, law-and-order superhero, this during a time in which Mexico and other Latin American countries still believed in, and pursued, economic progress via the developmentalist model, with a strong state, a very instrumental culture industry backed by the government, and so forth. Chapulín, by contrast, is the opposite of the regular superhero: weak, cowardly, and not too bright. If he is to be read as a national allegory, it certainly shows a different face of the Mexican state, in a time in which developmentalism was undoubtedly on its way out. The second part examines the two best selling musical genres in Latin America (and in the Hispanic market in the U.S.): the Mexican-U.S. Southwestern narcocorrido and the Puerto Rican-Nuyorican reggaetón, especially with respect to their treatment of drug lords, in the first case, and gang leaders, in the second. On many occasions, and in many ways, that treatment consists in depicting these outlaws as heroes, this in a post-communist, post-revolutionary, post-developmentalist world, and crucially, in a world after the complete failure and the devastating effects of neoliberalism in Latin America.

This dissertation explores Clarice Lispector's writing in three of her novels: A Paixão Segundo G.H., Àgua Viva, and A Hora da Estrela. The critical studies on this author typically center on three distinct points: (1) an examination of mysticism in relation to silence, (2) an underscoring of social criticism in Lispector's work, (3) a focus on the female role and its fractures. Taking a different path, and following poststructuralist thought, I demonstrate that writing constructs itself in order to be destroyed. Writing's "death" appeals to an aperture into the Other, so that it can inhabit a continuous life, which includes life and death. This aperture implies a sacrifice of writing's grammatical logic, a rupture with a rational order, and a contestation of the cumulative/capitalist system from a plethora of characters. To what extent, then, is this writing an act of love? And what are the ways in which it is constructed to be such an act of love? The answer can be summarized in one word: desire. Lispector's language is saturated with desire (desire for other human beings, for things, for animals, for God, etc.). This writing thus stretches itself to its limits for a desire that, paradoxically, does not necessarily go outside of a system, but inside of the intimate life of the characters, things, or animals. In this sense, the author goes back to the most organic level of life. From that place she inhabits and feeds the characters, the writing, and the readers with the power of life. Beyond the thematic of love in Lispector's work, I argue that language itself surrenders to desire; love therefore circulates within the writing, which breaks free of the "secure" trends of language, defying its logic, so that it comes to be possible to feel the silent identity of the world. Clarice Lispector's fiction mesmerizes us with what might be called obscure passages, which find their raison d'être in the strength of sensation rather than logic.

This work is a study of the relationship between literature and social criticism in nineteenth century Latin America. More specifically, it is an analysis of the critique of power as it was conveyed by authors from Mexico, Brazil and Argentina through literary genres such as the drama, the short story, the chronicle, and the political satire. It argues that through an aesthetic correlation between certain literary forms (mainly, the tragedy and the animal fable) and morality, these authors exercised a critique of the hegemonic discourse on social and racial domination in their societies. Using the figures of the slave and of the animal, these literary texts were not only criticizing governments and social practices, but also deconstructing the old aristocratic ethics in which the Enlightenment had founded the very legitimation of the modern state. Taking the figures of the slave and the animal as structural and analytical axes, this dissertation is devoted to the reading of six works. In the first section ("Slaves") it deals with three dramas that, invoking the relationship between tragedy and ethics, are proposed as political interventions that deconstruct the figure of the master and its moral contradictions in three post- colonial national scenarios. Despite the fact that its authors belonged to the political elites of their countries, these plays, Mãe (1860), by José de Alencar, Atar-Gull (1855), by Lucio V. Mansilla, and La venganza de la gleba (1906), by Federico Gamboa, are a unique access to the tensions and disarticulations within the national dominant ideologies of the times, and end up showing how the figure of the slave was already necessary in Eurocentric discourse on legitimate iv power and, ultimately, on the definition of the human. In the second section ("Fabulous Animals"), this dissertation analyses El gallo pitagórico (1842), by Juan Bautista Morales; Cuentos (1880), by Eduarda Mansilla, and chronicles and stories by Machado de Assis (c.1891- 1906). It argues that the talking animal in these texts (contrary to the norms of European fable) becomes a powerful vehicle for a moral critique that faces the discourse on humanism with its own failures and contradictions.

This project uncovers the role of recent German-Balkan works in articulating transnational identity in and through literature. Drawing on social and political models of European identity representations as well as on studies on stigma, trauma, and diasporic cultures as distinct historical formations, I contend that migrant fictions from Eastern Europe and the Balkans not only illuminate the concepts and demarcations operative in European collective imaginations but also introduce an Eastern European/Balkan dimension regarding the formation of modern identities beyond a national focus. To investigate this process, I focus on three Eastern European expatriates: the Bulgarian-born German and Austrian writers Rumjana Zacharieva and Dimitre Dinev and the Russian-German Wladimir Kaminer. The dissertation begins with an overview of postcolonial and Western theories of subjectivity and hybridity within the context of German literary-critical discourse on alterity, migration, and Turkish-German writings to argue that the historical and cultural context from which Eastern Europe/the Balkans have developed as Europes Other within requires a reconfiguration of present theoretical models. In historiographic fashion, this thesis emphasizes the role of Ottoman and Soviet legacies and Western domination on the formation of Balkan subaltern identities. Attending to a tradition of Balkanist discourse that engages the internal bipolar demarcation of Balkan identities as part Western, part Oriental, I reconsider in chapters 3 and 4 how Dinev and Zacharievas writings negotiate the experience of migration from East to West and articulate particular kinds of Balkan identities as a response to competing representations of the Balkans and the West. In the fifth chapter, my application of the Russian discourse on itself and Europe in examining Kaminers works transcends the discussion of migration and Balkan identities to offer a related, yet differentiated, account of the manifold processes that surround other Eastern European writings in German. By analyzing these narratives through an East-West lens, the study shows how thinking about identity and migration in literary and historical perspectives proves useful for understanding the shifting identities and borders in Germanic Europe and beyond.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2008. / "Graduate Program in Literatures in English." Includes bibliographical references (p. 220-228).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2009. / "Graduate Program in Literatures in English." Includes bibliographical references (p. 220-232).

The thesis aims to bring together the combined knowledge and research currently available relating to Manuel Lopes and his literary production, and seeks to provide further insight into the testimony of the author Manuel Lopes and his role and purpose within the Claridade movement. The study analyses the everyday reality of the Cape Verde Islands, its people and lands, and this is compared with the author's fictional representation, the characters, the principal themes, the author's main preoccupation with his fellow islanders, his style, and his purpose of supplanting the traditional literary theme of emigration with a radically new but simple one: the option of staying on the islands. The seven chapters of this study start with a theoretical discussion introducing the history of Cape Verde, the phenomenon of emigration as a constant of everyday existence on the islands, the four major waves of this constant exodus and their causes and consequences. This is followed by a brief biographical portrait of the author and then a discussion of how his own experiences brought him to explore the facts of life on the islands and insert them into his central literary themes. The literary portrayal of these realities, setting man's great love for the land against the ambiguous call of emigration, would thus lead him to lay down the bases for a new definition of Cabo-verdianidade. This leads into a general discussion of the new Claridade generation of writers, of which Lopes was a major exponent. Chapter six presents an analysis of the work Chuva Braba focusing on the characters who influence the protagonist Mané Quim either for or against leaving, thus revealing a clear pattern whereby the main theme of emigration becomes a debate between Partir and Ficar, between an abandonment of the islands and a new sense of loyalty towards the land of their birth.