<p> Haitian and Antillean literatures are written in French. However, certain linguistic deviations are noticed in the works of Francophone writers from the Americano-Caribbean region. Even though linguistic creativity is one of the most salient characteristics of these literatures, critics tend to analyze the messages of those authors through historical and cultural lenses. However, when one houses the layout of the text, one is able to discover in it a message that is not always accessible to the francophone reader unfamiliar with Haitian and Antillean cultures. That is the reason why this dissertation analyzes the language in the works of Haitian and Antillean authors not only as a medium of communication, but also as a message in itself. To conduct this study, the dissertation examines, in the first chapter, the theories of researchers such as Ferdinand de Saussure, Charles Baissac, Jules Faine, Suzanne Sylvain, Robert Chaudenson, and Albert Valdman. The second chapter takes into consideration the historical aspects of the development of the French-based Creoles and their status in Haiti and the Antilles through the texts of Thomas Madiou, Jean Fouchard, Gabriel Debien, Dani B&eacute;bel-Gisler, Frantz Fanon, Maryse Cond&eacute;, and Edouard Glissant. The third chapter investigates texts of Haitian authors from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the last quarter of the twentieth century. The writers studied include Ignace Nau, Oswald Durand, Justin Lh&eacute;risson, Jacques Roumain, and Marie-Th&eacute;r&egrave;se Colimon. The fourth chapter analyzes the Antillean writings through the three main literary periods: Negritude, Antillanit&eacute;, and Cr&eacute;olit&eacute;. The works of authors such as Aim&eacute; C&eacute;saire, Joseph Zobel, Edouard Glissant, Simone Schwarz-Bart, Maryse Cond&eacute;, and Rapha&euml;l Confiant are investigated. To determine whether and how the linguistic innovations are still reflected in the works published, the fifth chapter studies contemporary Haitian and Antillean novels. To a certain extent, this dissertation emphasizes the importance of the role and the significance of language in these territories. It provides new tools and opens up new research avenues to scholars interested in exploring the written work produced in this area of the Francophone world.</p><p>

This dissertation studies the ethic-esthetic project of the Puerto Rican patriot, Dr. Ramon Emeterio Betances Alacan, during half a century of revolutionary struggle. For this study, we will use various texts on Betances that have been preserved to present time. Among them, Betances by Luis Bonafoux is of great importance, in addition to the texts published by Carlos M. Rama, and the written by Feliz Ojeda Reyes. Furthermore, we will rely on the biography, El Antillano by Ada Suarez Diaz, a text of principal importance for this study. However, La virgen de Borinquen y epistolario intimo, the book that contains Betances' poetry, and some of his revolutionary speeches and proclamations, deserves particular attention since they are fundamental to emphasize the symbiosis between the great loves of the patriarch: the fatherland, liberty and a woman. The first chapter is dedicated to explaining the birth and formation of Betances as a patriarch. We will look into the influences Betances received from the bosom of his home. In addition, we will see the importance that Betances' home upbringing had in his political growth and maturity in the revolutionary Paris of 1848, as well as in the rise of his campaign for the abolition of slavery after his return to Puerto Rico in 1856. This part of our study will aim to link his family experience to his revolutionary activities in Paris, in an attempt to reveal the birth of Betances the patriarch. The second chapter will be dedicated to the study of Betances' epistolary texts. Maria del Carmen Henri Betances, the only woman loved by the patriarch, is the cornerstone upon which these texts will be sustained. Maria del Carmen Henri is the muse that illuminated Betances' existence, and whose sudden death unleashed his most poetic and heart-rending writings. This contributed to the link between his esthetic and political concepts, achieving with this a "betanciana" poetry of the fatherland. In the third chapter we will study the narrative, La Virgen de Borinquen, where we will see the symbols of the beloved woman and the fatherland as the center that moves the spirit of this writer. In the fourth chapter we will analyze some of Betances' poetry, as well as a few of his revolutionary proclamations and speeches, in which he uses biblical references to advocate the independence of Puerto Rico. The final chapter will offer the conclusions of this study.

This is a novel that takes place primarily in 1947 – 1948—the immediate postwar period—in a fictional British Caribbean island named St. Francis. St. Francis, while a distinct fictional space, is strongly based off the island I grew up in, the Commonwealth of Dominica, in the days after the War when many British Caribbean islands still had American bases and were embroiled in battles to end their rule by the British. The novel follows four primary characters: a teenage trans girl named Imogen, who doesn't even know the word "transgender" might exist and who most of the world knows as "Derek"; her grandmother, Isabel Catarina da Gama, who for many years has lived alone with Imogen in the da Gama family mansion; Beija-flor, a Brazilian teenage girl from Sao Paulo who has come with her father to St. Francis, as her father is involved in a mysterious job in the island, and who has been promised to be married to a man back in Brazil she does not love; and Monsignor Bakkus, a highly influential religious figure in the island who has a secret history with Isabel Catarina that torments him. In the beginning of the novel, the da Gamas' house burns down when Imogen steps outside to investigate two things she isn't accustomed to: the sound of someone singing and the smell of guavas. When she returns, the house is on fire, and her grandmother, furious, tells her Imogen must pay her back for what she has done, as well as to rebuild the house. In order to generate money, the grandmother forces Imogen to put on a disturbing, dangerous show that attracts people from across the island, including American soldiers from the nearby WWII base and the local pastor, who condemns the show and calls the monsignor to the village to investigate. Imogen meets Beija-flor through the show, and the two form a fast friendship. But when Imogen begins to stray beyond her grandmother's control to spend more time with Beija-flor and to try to figure out her own identity, they begin to learn things about themselves and the world that they can never unlearn. When the monsignor arrives in the village with an agenda to not only stop the show and deal with the American soldiers' brothel but to confront his past with Isabel Catarina, chaos ensues, and everyone learns that they must make decisions that will terrify them—and change them forever. This is a novel about love, loss, gender, religion, imperialism, and much more. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2017. / April 12, 2017. / Caribbean, Dominica, LGBT, LGBTQ, Queer, Transnational / Includes bibliographical references. / Mark Winegardner, Professor Directing Dissertation; Martin Munro, University Representative; Diane Roberts, Committee Member; Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Committee Member; Candace Ward, Committee Member.

In the context of American imperialism, what role does the interracial/interethnic literary romance play? Do these romances offer the possibility of integrating politically disparate elements, or do these literary unions reveal the conflicts of nation-building at a time of territorial expansion? Drawing upon Doris Sommer's work on heterosexual romances and Robert McKee Irwin's work on homosocial bonds and both authors studies on nation-formation in Latin America, I explore interethnic/interracial unions in works by American and Latino writers and analyze the role these fictional romances and unions serve in representing the inclusion of new peoples and the formation of American national identity at the time of territorial expansion. The texts examined include Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don, Elizabeth Van Deusen's collection short story readers, Stories of Porto Rico and Tropical Tales (Porto Rico) and Manuel Zeno Gandía's Redentores. Through their use of the interracial/interethnic romance and unions, I argue that these writers reveal the complications of the larger geopolitical unions being constructed by the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth century. These texts show the potentially subversive power that love, the romance trope, and related themes and homosocial bonds may have in a genre that traditionally emphasizes unions; in addition these works demonstrate that in unions—whether romantic or political—tensions will always persist. Lastly, these texts also demonstrate the frailty of using the nation-as-lovers as the emblematic trope of a nation that will hold within it multiple unions. Issues discussed include how romance is constructed, including the allusions, metaphors, plot devices, and motifs incorporated to tell the story of that romance; representation of these unions in light of United States' anti-miscegenation laws; the construction of consent; education and the lessons of domesticity.

An examination of postcolonial writings from the Caribbean disrupts the notion that postcolonial discourse is locked in a mode of constant reply to the colonizer and keeps the colonial powers at the center. Many Caribbean writers focus their discourse primarily on the ways their own communities internalize received ideas, and use them as the basis of social organization and interpersonal relationships. This study examines the use of Caribbean orature as the narrative strategy in selected Anglophone Caribbean fiction. I use a performance studies-centered approach to read prose fiction by Merle Collins, Earl Lovelace and Olive Senior that exemplifies the "inward turn" of Caribbean postcolonial criticism. I argue that these writers use specific oral forms to critique and challenge their communities, while affirming their local resources. In The Colour of Forgetting Merle Collins interrogates her community's rejection of its indigenous stories, in favor of a Euro-centric written history that privileges the outsiders' perspectives. Colour performs and presents an inclusive history, inspired formally and substantially by Grenadian oral tradition. I enter the conversation about Earl Lovelace's well-known nationalist discourse and validation of Caribbean orature by reading the gender ideologies that his choice of narrative strategy and treatment of female characters trouble. My central argument is that this writer's works reflect the lived experience of gender relationships in the Caribbean, rather than the dominant culture's colonially-derived patriarchal structure. My reading of Olive Senior's stories explores her use of gossip and other oral forms associated primarily with women to highlight how differences in race that informed life in colonial and early postcolonial Jamaica remain a central part of life in contemporary Jamaican society. I conclude that, in writing texts that straddle European literary traditions and Caribbean orature, these writers demonstrate the inevitable merging of and tensions among cultures and knowledge systems that characterize life in colonial/modern societies. However, more importantly, reading their fictions in the ways I have read them directs attention to the "inward turn" of postcolonial criticism that is sometimes elided in postcolonial discussions.

This dissertation addresses questions of the body that is imagined within contemporary Puerto Rican literature. Specifically, I focus on how the Afro-Puerto Rican body, as a site of artistic representation, articulates particular conceptions of history and narration in contemporary Puerto Rican culture. I have examined the texts of Luis Palés Matos, Isabelo Zenón, Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá and Beatriz Berrocal. In this study I argue that the literary embodiment of the Afro-Puerto Rican self is the crucial site where conflicting national discourses have been written and read, and as such demonstrates its ambivalent role in the struggles towards emancipation, citizenship and autonomy in the twentieth-century. Ultimately, the ways in which these texts construct relations based on the Afro-Puerto Rican experience have highlighted the inconsistencies, irregularities and upheavals that have characterized Puerto Rican literary, social and political history. Given the extent to which my approach is intertwined with other mainstream and marginal literary traditions, I have explored the historical and conceptual links of the chosen Puerto Rican texts with Caribbean, Latin American, and African-American literary traditions. By highlighting the Afro-Puerto Rican body and its cultural development, my examination reveals that one of the main intentions of this literary trend is to socially organize in the world of fiction the consciousness of the racial group. Stories of escape from bondage, redemptive suffering, and struggles of the weak against colonizing powers have led writers to particular ways of creating pseudo-autobiographical dramatizations of the Afro-Puerto Rican self. In fact, a consideration of Afro-Puerto Rican literature beyond just being about black themes can provide a reorientation for the analysis of contemporary Caribbean literary aesthetics. These are issues that my work will advance in the field of Afro-Hispanic and Latin American literatures.

At the Crossroads: African American and Caribbean Writers in the Interwar Period charts discourses of folk culture, empire and modernity in the works of six African American and Caribbean writers. Each of the dissertation's three sections pairs a writer from the U.S. with a writer from the Anglophone, Francophone or Spanish-speaking Caribbean: Jean Toomer and Eric Walrond; Langston Hughes and Nicolás Guillén; and Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Price-Mars. I argue that these writers engage the concept of modernity precisely by turning to "imperial sites" that are conspicuously absent from dominant narratives of modern progress. With a sustained interest in the masses and vernacular culture, they turn to the remnants of the Southern plantation, the Caribbean "backwoods," the inner city slums and other "elsewheres" presumably left behind by history. I contend that U.S. empire is a crucial frame for reading the various representations of local folk culture in these works. From the construction of the Panama Canal on the eve of WWI, to the U.S. military occupation of Haiti and ongoing intervention in Cuba, the interwar years are marked by aggressive U.S. expansion into the Caribbean basin. Though it is commonplace to observe that interwar literature is preoccupied with newness and change, less acknowledged is the role of U.S. imperialism in constituting this newness. Caribbean experience is profoundly influenced by these events, and as African Americans sought fuller citizenship they could not ignore the workings of U.S. imperialism just south of the South. Far from being symbols of a bygone time, these imperial sites--and the "folk" who inhabit them--help to produce the modern. At the Crossroads considers the entanglements of U.S. empire and Jim Crow as it traces uses of the folk and vernacular culture across this U.S-Caribbean literary space. The "folk" emerge as a concept that varies across space and time, challenging anew the claims to authenticity, shared origins, and monolithic community that have persistently shaped understandings of the folk's place in the black tradition.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Florida, 2003. / Title from title page of source document. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Claude McKay (1890-1948) is best known as a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance and a pioneer of Caribbean literature. He is less well known as a political thinker and activist. This thesis undertakes three tasks. First, it provides a detailed presentation of Claude McKay's political ideas and practices over time. Second, it critically engages with these. And finally, in the process, debunks and challenges a number of pervasive misconceptions of McKayfs politics. Although the analysis covers the period 1890 to 1920, it nevertheless is based upon the entire corpus of McKay's work - published and unpublished - from his early writings in Jamaica to those up to his death in 1948. His preoccupations and thought are placed within their historical context. The thesis thus draws upon his non-fiction texts, poetry, novels, short stories, journalism, unfinished manuscripts and correspondence. In the process, it demonstrates that McKay was a major political thinker, that his ideas have remarkable resonance today, especially in the United States, and that they are still relevant to contemporary black politics, particularly to those of the African diaspora. All in all, the thesis is a contribution to a better understanding of a remarkable man and outstanding figure of the African diaspora.

Postcolonial theorists tend to read metaphor generally as a trope of power that synthesizes its inherently binary structure of tenor and vehicle to produce totalizing meanings. Although some critics have emphasized the importance of metaphor in postcolonial and Canadian studies, theorists like Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak tend to approach metaphor either in exclusively structuralist or in predominantly deconstructivist terms. In contrast to these approaches, this study examines how texts from different postcolonial traditions of writing reconfigure metaphor for political and cultural reasons. It reads metaphor as a trope of cultural crisis that produces contiguous histories and crosscultural identities that contest clearly defined national boundaries. While it is impossible to resist metaphor's self-deconstructive tendencies, this project shows that we can resist and rearticulate its oppressive effects by conceptualizing metaphor's operative modes in performative and postcolonial terms. Performative metaphors generate, while keeping in suspense, the social and psychological constraints that impact on the construction of identity. The cultural significance of performative metaphors lies in their potential to replace the metaphoric binary structure of vehicle and tenor with metaphor's ability to reiterate and destabilize dominant discourses of race, gender, and nationalism. In the context of ethnic Canadian and Caribbean writing, performative metaphors foreground questions of naming, memory, and cultural translation; they also challenge those rhetorical and literary forms through which cultural and national identities are imagined and represented in “authentic” and “original” terms. A performative understanding of metaphor, as developed in this dissertation, articulates an ethical imperative that, first, accounts for the physical and representational violence enacted on the subaltern body and, second, acknowledges the ways in which subaltern subjects produce cultural knowledge with a difference. Methodologically, this study combines feminist theories of performativity with postcolonial theory, Caribbean and Canadian literary criticism. It discusses Judith Butter's theory of performativity in the context of ethnic Canadian historiographical writing, Caribbean performance and epic poetry. A critical examination of texts by Derek Walcott, David Dabydeen, Austin Clarke, M. G. Vassanji, and Sky Lee demonstrates that metaphor is one of the most important tools for a postcolonial critique of identity and nation formation. / Graduate