This project explores visually experimental poetry as a particular trend in Caribbean poetry since the 1970's. Although visual experimentation in Caribbean poetry is immediately recognizable ??? for example, its play with font styles and sizes, its jagged margins, its division of the page into multiple discourse spaces, its use of images ??? little critical attention has been paid to the visual qualities of Caribbean poetry. Instead, definitions of Caribbean poetry have remained focussed upon oral/aural aesthetics, excluding its use of and contribution to late 20th century experimental poetic practice. By focussing on the poetry of Shake Keane, Claire Harris, Marlene Nourbese Philip, Kamau Brathwaite, and LeRoy Clarke, I bring post-colonial literary criticism into discussion with contemporary debates regarding visual poetic practice in North America. In so doing, this project values Caribbean visual poetry both for its expression of Caribbean cultural experience and for its contributions to broader experimental poetry movements. I argue that visual experimentation functions to disrupt traditional linear reading processes, which thereby allows poets to perform the flux of time and space in post-colonial contexts. Furthermore, such disruption of linear reading practices, often manifested by the positioning of multiple discourses on one page, serves to create a polyvocal discourse that resists patriarchal and colonialist power structures. Valuing the visual qualities of Caribbean poetry as signifying elements, this dissertation explores the aesthetic and social implications of inscription and visual design in Caribbean poetry.

The advent of Area Studies and Comparative Literature in US academia developed in response to (or, more aptly, as a result of) the Cold War in the 1960s, with locations such as the Middle East relegated to Area Studies due to the strategic importance that knowledge of its histories, cultures, and languages had for global (read: US) geopolitics. On the other hand, the discipline of Comparative Literature constituted the expansion of US literary studies due to the influx of European intellectual refugees, with scholars and practitioners formulating the field around texts in, primarily, German and Romance languages in conversation with Anglophone texts. Over the past two decades, this Eurocentric model of Comparative Literature has been challenged, and, to some extent, subverted. Yet more often than not, modern Persian Literature is consigned to the realm of Area Studies in general and a Middle Eastern discourse in particular. My dissertation, “Disorderly Political Imaginations: Comparative Readings of Iranian and Caribbean Fiction and Poetry, 1960s-1980s,” addresses this gap by placing Iran and Persian literature front and center of a comparative project that includes canonical writers from the anglophone and francophone Caribbean. Additionally, “Disorderly Political Imaginations” considers intellectual figures and their literary productions that contributed to the liberation of individual and social consciousness. These figures created unique forms and languages of revolt that deviated from the prevailing definitions of committed, political, or national literature. In The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, Vijay Prashad sets a precedent for comparing Iran and the Caribbean in his chapter titled “Tehran,” by connecting Gharbzadegi (Westoxification or Occidentosis)—the cultural and socio-political manifesto of Jalal Al-e Ahmad—and Aimé Césaire’s négritude. On a broader, geopolitical level, he concomitantly connects imperial schemes in the “nominally independent” Iran and Caribbean region, along with the forms of resistance to them. Yet, for a chapter titled “Tehran,” the focus is mostly the contribution of other Third World projects to that of Iran’s. Conversely, “Disorderly Political Imaginations” centers Iran as a comparable case meriting comprehensive analysis in Third World cultural and political projects. Furthermore, rather than study the works of Al-e Ahmad and Césaire as exemplary cultural projects of resistance, I choose to investigate alternative modes of political thought and writing that move beyond the framework of “resistance”—modes that are not always considered as contributing to the political landscape. The “disorderly” politics and the “disorderly” creations of the writers under study thus take to task the idea of political literature during the decades of global decolonization, motivated by Jean Paul Sartre’s littérature engagée (engaged literature). In three chapters, I study Iranian literature of the mid to late 1960s in comparison to African diasporic literature from the Caribbean of the late 1970s to mid 1980s. The oft-overlooked issue of gender in national liberation projects of the time is addressed in my first chapter, “Scarecrows and Whores: Women in Savashoun and Hérémakhonon,” as I compare the two novels by Simin Daneshvar and Maryse Condé. The multilingual female protagonists in the novels of Condé and Daneshvar act as both literal and cultural interpreters and intermediaries in the narratives. I then extend my analysis of these protagonists’ precarious positions to the equally precarious intellectual positions of their creators in political discourses. By using Condé’s delineation of disorder in “Order, Disorder, Freedom and the West Indian Writer” as a necessary marker for freedom in both thought and creativity, central arguments of my dissertation about disorderly political imaginations are also presented. In “Disrupted and Disruptive Genealogies in the Novels of Hushang Golshiri and Édouard Glissant,” I compare Golshiri’s Shazdeh Ehtejab (Prince Ehtejab) and Éduoard Glissant’s La case du commandeur (The Overseer’s Cabin). Building upon Michél Foucault’s concept of “subjugated knowledges,” I demonstrate how their protagonists’ insistence on finding answers to the political questions of the present in the historical past (of empire and slavery respectively) leads to their insanity, and how, concomitantly, the formal characteristics of these narratives (such as their in-betweenness in terms of genre, language, and mode of address) offer “noncoercive knowledge” (to use Edward Said’s phrasing from The World, the Text, and the Critic) in lieu of answers. While taking into consideration the world literary traditions these novelists are engaging with, my analysis moves beyond a poststructuralist critique; instead, I privilege these writers’ own historical, socio-political, and cultural contexts in literary analysis, both distinctively and in comparison with one another. In “Poet-Travelers: The Poetic Geographies of Sohrab Sepehri and Derek Walcott,” I analyze how they both create a poetic language of revolt and liberation that, while affirming multiple literary and linguistic traditions, cannot be dismissed as derivative or unoriginal. In this comparative reading, I study their particular use of enjambments and anaphora, the combination of an autobiographical, monologic poetic voice with that of dramatic dialogues, a plethora of travel imagery and vocabulary that reflect the poets’ own multitudinous travels, the disparate religious, mythic, and folkloric traditions they draw from, and ultimately, the unique languages they create. In comparing these texts, I consider the different and particular historical moments they were written in, which is a revolutionary moment for Iran, and for the Caribbean texts is a postcolonial moment. The political nuances of these different contexts thus effect the timbre of the texts, and these divergences in articulation are analyzed as well. “Disorderly Political Imaginations” thus does not create a homogenizing, globalized study of literary texts. In that same vein, my research demonstrates the valence that incorporating neglected subjects (in this case, Persian language and literary studies) into Comparative Literature can have in understanding the hegemonic structures of power at play in knowledge production, both locally and globally.

Understanding and defining nation and identity in diaspora has long characterized the cultural production of Caribbean authors. Notwithstanding, Hispanic Caribbean authors that have emigrated to the United States face this question doubly as they form part of what is labeled the Latino community. While much of the Latino Studies groundwork began in Mexican American or Chicano literary circles, whose cultural background is vastly different from that of the Hispanic Caribbean, authors of Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican descent have brought new perspectives to constructions of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation to the broadly named “Latino/a” experience. While much of the early theoretical and literary work was written by men, women writers began to produce prolifically in the late twentieth century. The first voices to be published in mass were primarily those of a privileged existence, coming from families of higher social classes within the Latino community, despite being marginalized within the context of the United States. During the late 1970s to early 1990s, literary production established that being Cuban American, Dominican American, and Puerto Rican in the mainland U.S. meant being light-skinned, heterosexual, and of middle to upper-class economic status. However, during the mid-to-late 1990s and early twenty-first century, new voices came to the forefront to challenge these hegemonic constructions of Caribbean Latina identity that dominated the cultural imaginary and, instead, presented intersectional protagonists who consistently face discrimination based on their gender, sexual orientation, race, and economic class both in and outside of the Latino community. By utilizing diverse strategies of resistance, such as humor, these authors, including Achy Obejas, Jennine Capó-Crucet, Loida Maritza Pérez, Angie Cruz, Giannina Braschi, and Erika López, highlight and satirize the normative aspects of the Hispanic Caribbean diasporic cultural imaginary that marginalizes and/or excludes the voices and experiences of their characters as being representative of Caribbean Latina identity. In this sense, these authors not only represent a marginalized perspective of identity within the Latino community, but they also re-present, as in presenting anew, a more diverse image of Latina identity in the twenty-first century that departs from the homogenous, normative image of Caribbean Latinas played out in earlier narratives of identity from the early-1990s Latina literary boom. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2018. / February 22, 2018. / Diaspora, Hispanic Caribbean, Latina Women, Race, Sexuality, U.S. Latinx Literature / Includes bibliographical references. / Delia Poey, Professor Directing Dissertation; Virgil Suárez, University Representative; José Gomariz, Committee Member; Jeannine Murray-Román, Committee Member; Peggy Sharpe, Committee Member.

Haiti’s public image has long vacillated between extremes: from democratic beacon to shadow of insurrection; from space of racial uplift to pit of economic exploitation; from bearer of Enlightenment ideals to dark land of “voodoo.” Indeed the two taglines most commonly associated with Haiti are: “first black republic” and “poorest country in the Western hemisphere.” These opposing taglines fit within a critical paradigm that has long viewed Haiti in terms of example (as a site of universal emancipation and racial equality) and exception (or, in Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s memorable words, the notion that Haiti is “unnatural, erratic, and therefore unexplainable.”) This dissertation engages these two competing figures of Haitian exemplarity and Haitian exceptionalism in early 19th-century literatures of the black Americas. In doing so, I examine Haiti both as an imagined space and as a site of literary production whose products circulated in various and sometimes misleading translations. This network of what I call “translations of Haiti’ re-navigate, and mark with difference, traditional narratives of race and nation. My project reveals how the idea of Haiti flickered through many complex forms in the early 19th-century. Some of these forms fall into the rubric of exception/example but others do not: from sister in democracy, to vanguard of black internationalism, to potential site of exploitation, to occasion for domestic reflection. By nuancing the binary between example and exception, I question critical accounts that depict early representations of the first black republic as either symptomatic of white anxieties or an ideal site for the realization of black nationalist projects. These accounts, I argue, often overlook how national and racial categories failed to overlap; they occlude Haitian (and especially Kreyòl) literary production; and, most importantly, they ignore the complex transnational movements occasioned by this production. I argue that when we consider translation as a metaphor (for example, the notion of translation as an analogical model or heuristic) we must also consider translation as a practice with material consequences. I negotiate between Haiti’s powerful abstraction(s) and a material network of constantly circulating, translated and re-translated texts. These texts, I argue, provoked fears and anxieties, but also speculations, hopes, and visions amongst constantly changing constituents of groups that may or may not be usefully labeled (for example, free U.S. blacks; mulâtres; noirs; U.S. northerners; etc.) Using this shifting international stage as a point of departure, “Translated Subjects” takes Haitian cultural production seriously – that is to say, as more than a convenient metaphor – to reveal new channels of literary exchange.

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Si pour les ethnographes les mythes sont essentiels à la survie de toute société, cela pose problème quand on considère la Caraïbe et la rupture de l’esclavage. Une étude de la littérature antillaise réaliste merveilleuse nous montre que si les romans sont imprégnés par la spiritualité et le folklore, nous n’y trouvons aucun mythe des origines. Comment une société peut-elle subsister sans ces éléments fondamentaux ? Combinant une approche mythocritique à une mythanalyse des oeuvres d’auteurs antillais contemporains, nous émettons cette hypothèse : en s’inspirant de multiples héritages, ils se constituent une identité par la reconstruction de mythes spécifiquement antillais. Vu l’absence de romans antillais contemporains dans les études du magical realism et du réalisme merveilleux, notre première partie explore ce dernier concept pour en proposer une nouvelle catégorisation : le réalisme mystique. Notre deuxième partie examine les principes narratifs des romans en se demandant comment les auteurs parviennent à concilier un double héritage oralité/écriture et à sauvegarder leur identité. Notre dernière partie illustre enfin comment, par l’utilisation de schémas mythique spécifiques et un recentrement sur l’île natale, les textes mettent en place sa (re)mythisation.Cette étude permet la mise à jour de nouveaux paradigmes dans la littérature antillaise contemporaine. Elle montre comment le réalisme mystique est une modalité rattachée au magical realism qui, combinant réalisme historico ethnographique et folklore local, s’applique spécifiquement à la région des Antilles. Dépassant l’impossibilité théorique de transition de l’oralité vers l’écriture, nous révélons aussi que l’utilisation de l’ « oraliture » par les écrivains et le rôle de « guerriers de l’imaginaire » associé à certains d’entre eux propose une harmonisation oralité/écriture de même qu’une sauvegarde identitaire. Enfin, nous voyons qu’un certain nombre de romans réalistes mystiques proposent, outre une mise à distance de l’Afrique et de la France, un nouveau mythe originel centré sur la traversée de l’océan et un passage matriciel par la cale des négriers. Nous voyons également comment, loin de territoires d’acculturation comme les plantations, les auteurs développent une restructuration mythique de l’espace, notamment par une mise en valeur de la nature primordiale devenue propice à une renaissance identitaire.

Si pour les ethnographes les mythes sont essentiels à la survie de toute société, cela pose problème quand on considère la Caraïbe et la rupture de l’esclavage. Une étude de la littérature antillaise réaliste merveilleuse nous montre que si les romans sont imprégnés par la spiritualité et le folklore, nous n’y trouvons aucun mythe des origines. Comment une société peut-elle subsister sans ces éléments fondamentaux ? Combinant une approche mythocritique à une mythanalyse des oeuvres d’auteurs antillais contemporains, nous émettons cette hypothèse : en s’inspirant de multiples héritages, ils se constituent une identité par la reconstruction de mythes spécifiquement antillais. Vu l’absence de romans antillais contemporains dans les études du magical realism et du réalisme merveilleux, notre première partie explore ce dernier concept pour en proposer une nouvelle catégorisation : le réalisme mystique. Notre deuxième partie examine les principes narratifs des romans en se demandant comment les auteurs parviennent à concilier un double héritage oralité/écriture et à sauvegarder leur identité. Notre dernière partie illustre enfin comment, par l’utilisation de schémas mythique spécifiques et un recentrement sur l’île natale, les textes mettent en place sa (re)mythisation.Cette étude permet la mise à jour de nouveaux paradigmes dans la littérature antillaise contemporaine. Elle montre comment le réalisme mystique est une modalité rattachée au magical realism qui, combinant réalisme historico ethnographique et folklore local, s’applique spécifiquement à la région des Antilles. Dépassant l’impossibilité théorique de transition de l’oralité vers l’écriture, nous révélons aussi que l’utilisation de l’ « oraliture » par les écrivains et le rôle de « guerriers de l’imaginaire » associé à certains d’entre eux propose une harmonisation oralité/écriture de même qu’une sauvegarde identitaire. Enfin, nous voyons qu’un certain nombre de romans réalistes mystiques proposent, outre une mise à distance de l’Afrique et de la France, un nouveau mythe originel centré sur la traversée de l’océan et un passage matriciel par la cale des négriers. Nous voyons également comment, loin de territoires d’acculturation comme les plantations, les auteurs développent une restructuration mythique de l’espace, notamment par une mise en valeur de la nature primordiale devenue propice à une renaissance identitaire.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 290-300).

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