Thesis (M.A. in anthropology)--Washington State University, May 2010. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on July 12, 2010). "Department of Anthropology." Includes bibliographical references (p. 23-27).

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Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins, in their recently published Postcolonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics, highlight the significance of metatheatrical tendencies in the resistance drama of Anglophone arenas of decolonization, particularly those of the Anglophone Caribbean. Insisting on such metatheater as more than simply postmodern play, Gilbert and Tompkins crucially note the emergence of a critically conscious theater that explores and explodes notions of subjectivity, ideologies of difference and monologies of mastery. My studies in postcolonial drama and theory have led me toward similar sites and modes of struggle, culminating in a project that focuses upon this act of metatheater in the Caribbean and seeks to interpret its socio-ideological/cultural implications in light of recent postcolonial, feminist, discursive critique. Generated out of nationalist Theaters of Dissimulation that enact an unmasking of the discourses of race and mastery so crucial to the dissemblances of colonial master-scripts, I argue that Caribbean theater in the West Indies, Puerto Rico, and the Antilles translates these early nationalist revolutions into an involutionary act, one that avoids the reinscription of patriarchal, racialist, essentializing notions of identity and attempts instead to deconstruct what Stuart Hall has termed the "politics of representation." Through this spotlighting of image and image systems rather than identity politics, 80s playwrights make Edouard Glissant's concept of theatralization--the very act of cultural ontology--the main actor on the stage, creating a Theater of Dissimilation that, like Kamau Brathwaite's idea of "nation language," represents a cultural process of critical creolization.

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The thesis that Caribbean Theology is Public Theology is an articulation of the praxis of seeking to build a just and responsible society. It surveys the historical and contemporary context of the Caribbean and defines its struggle against inequality and the distortion of identity. This history of the Caribbean is a history of the resistance by the people of the Caribbean against inequality and notions of their inferiority. Caribbean Theology is founded on this emancipatory imagination of the people and this spirit of resistance. The liberation biblical hermeneutic reading strategy of Caribbean Theology is a reader response approach which comes to the text from the world in front of the text. The Legion narrative in Mark Chapter Five is offered as an example of this reading strategy. The narrative is used as lenses to reflect upon the problem of self-mutilating violence in the Caribbean. It argues that the high incident of violence is the result of the interiorization of oppression and therefore the distortion of identity. The narrative is also an analogy of Caribbean reality in the ways in which recalcitrant forces collude in order to seek to re-entrench patterns of inequality and oppression. Caribbean Theology began as a self-conscious movement in response to the call for justice and liberation, to pursue Caribbean identity and to conscientize. It is also alert to the fact that the struggle for Caribbean selfhood contends with reactionary forces that are determined to reverse historical gains. These forces are aided and abetted by idolatry. Caribbean Theology must therefore pursue the triple tasks of exorcism, iconoclasm and holism through the congregational life and prophetic witness of the Church in the public square.

This thesis rereads the work of Aimé Césaire and René Depestre as a broad reply to the current drive in Caribbean literary studies to stress similarities and points of convergence between the various islands of the archipelago and their authors. It asks questions such as: how do these two Caribbean writers construct their sense of themselves; how do they relate to the Caribbean and to the wider world; and how do the historical and cultural particularities of their respective islands influence all of this? For Aimé Césaire, I argue that his sense of himself and of the Caribbean is essentially shaped around the <I>circuit triangulaire</I>, the model of Africa/Europe/Caribbean interdependencies, ultimately inherited from the time of the slave trade. I show how Césaire views the Caribbean as a deeply traumatic, insubstantial space; how he looks to Africa for his lost sense of self; and how Europe is at once the malevolent colonial power and also the home of poetry, learning etc. I then compare Césaire's Caribbean "shape" to that of René Depestre, and a quite different model emerges. I find that Africa is relatively absent in Depestre's work: Europe is not presented as a threat; and that Depestre, unlike Césaire, sees, in the Caribbean, an energy and a creativity brought about by the historical fusion of disparate cultures. I consider how the reality of Depestre's long exile from the Caribbean has affected his views of the islands. In conclusion, I bring the argument back to its starting point: the problematic (as I see it) attempt to view and read writing from the Caribbean as one literature. Difference and diversity, I argue, predominate as Caribbean writing embraces the new century, and the whole notion of Caribbeanness undergoes further processes of highly creative splintering and reshaping.

The House That Jack Built is a contemporary novel, set on the mythical Caribbean island of St. Anne, that explores enduring themes of American literature such as independence, selfdetermination, and the effects of greed on the independent spirit.