This dissertation presents a study of the poetry of Jose Joaquin Perez. His writings formulate an aesthetic, national and social program. From this perspective, descriptive poetry and pro-Amerindian poetry are analyzed as poetic discourse which represents the founding of a nation and of a poetic art form for literature. These aspects are analyzed as a function of poetic agents which represent national themes and language. These themes and this language have been highlighted by critics as the factors which define these writings. At the same time, the progressive lyric of Perez is analyzed as a discourse which reflects a social program for a nation. This stems from the interpretations the poet makes of positivist doctrines of his time. The first chapter presents the literary enclaves which frame Jose Joaquin Perez's poetry. The study focuses on an analysis of Santo Domingo's Romantic lyric, paying close attention to its most recurrent themes. Here, the most representative writers of this type of discourse are also presented. In addition, the dissertation focuses on extant criticism on the poet's work and Perez's own literary criticism. Chapters two and three present the theoretical framework for analyzing the texts. Chapter two pays special attention to the tradition of foundational and programmatic characters of Romantic lyric of Spanish-America. Here, the concept of Romanticism, as it is used in this work, is defined. Also highlighted are the critics who have studied this tradition, followed by an explanation based on themes and ideas. This helps explain the foundational writing that descriptive and pro-Amerindian poets of this period have developed. Also in this chapter, the interpretations of the positivist doctrine in Spanish-America are presented, as well as the social character of Spanish-American Romanticism. The third chapter elaborates on the language factors that Angloamerican and Spanish-American criticism have determined to be agents in foundational writings. In chapter four, the poems of Jose Joaquin Perez are analyzed, based on that which has been proposed in this dissertation. Chapter five contains the conclusions of this work.

Maria Luisa Puga y Rosario Ferre como escritoras latinoamericanas comprometen su labor literaria como un vehiculo para articular un discurso descolonizador. Sus narrativas llevaran al lector por mundos y periodos tan diversos como similares, ya que parten de la misma hipotesis de trabajo, a decir, recordar que la realidad latinoamericana es una resultante de un proceso colonizador. Su narrativa utiliza estrategicamente la fragmentacion discursiva y la incorporacion del discurso testimonial para crear una apertura simbolica en el fenomeno de la colonizacion. Para el estudio de sus obras se han tomado en cuenta conceptos marxistas (Eagleton, Jameson) para establacer realciones entre lo politico/economico y el devenir social e individual, que se extienden hasta la polemica de los derechos humanos (Vidal). Puga en Las posibilidades del odio presenta una serie de personajes kenianos, cuyas vidas atestiguan los cambios que la colonizacion les trajera, asi como la desolacion en que se encuentran tras luchas internas por su determinacion nacional. De estos, la joven Nyambura ocupa un lugar predominate en la narrativa, y es a traves de su historia familiar y personal que se incurre en el acto simbolico de liberacion. Rosario Ferre en Maldito amor lleva al lector por un recorrido historico en la vida de Puerto Rico. La familia De la Valle personifica y establece el borde dentro del cual se circunscribe la experiencia colinizante del pais, siendo dos mujeres mulatas, Titina y Gloria, las que al final estan por quemar todo signo de traicion, de explotacion economica y de discriminacion racial. El discurso decolonizante femenino y de lo femenino que se desprende por la lectura es uno en que el Sujeto, al politizarse, se posesiona del lenguaje para describir el asombro, la violencia y la perplejidad de la fuerza colonizadora ante la lucha del Sujeto por su reinvindicacion social y por sus derechos humanos. Puga y Ferre, como escritoras latinoamericanas, se inscriben en la tradicion de un contra-discurso (Cunningham) que refiere a un cambio cualitativo de su insercion y participacion en la Historia. i

Caribbean authors, due to the unique geographical, social and historical contexts of their work, have long been preoccupied with the notion of authenticity. Yet the project of uncovering or inventing an "authentic" Caribbean discourse has repeatedly confronted difficulties resulting from the intrinsic hybridity and dynamism of the region. In particular, discourses of origin and belonging based on national boundaries or ethnic essentialism have proven inadequate for rendering the "essence" of the Caribbean experience. This problem has been exacerbated by the fact that such discourses are generally dependent on European literary forms to be their vehicle. For each of the three novelists studied in this dissertation, the discourse of the marvelous seemed to offer a path for creating a fictional identity quest which would be able to capture something of this unique but elusive Caribbean "essence". The dissertation argues that by tracing the transcultural route taken by Marvelous Realism and later Magic Realism through three novels by Jacques Stephen Alexis of Haiti, Alejo Carpentier of Cuba, and Simone Schwarz-Bart of Guadeloupe, one becomes aware of an evolution in the use of the marvelous which reflects different approaches to the dilemma faced by the Caribbean artist coping with the seemingly contradictory demands of a Parisian intellectual formation and an authentic "Caribbean" sensibility. This evolution reveals an emerging "postmodernist" consciousness in the quest for an authentic Caribbean discourse, suggesting a growing acceptance on the part of Caribbean writers of the hybrid nature of their intellectual and cultural heritage. Using analysis based on writings by Antonio Gramsci, Edouard Glissant, Gayatri Spivak, Regine Robin, Stephen Slemon and Paul Gilroy among others, the dissertation explores the ways in which these three novelists, poised uneasily between two continents, have through their fiction and essays struggled and/or come to terms with the "decentered" positionality which seems to be so "central" to the Caribbean experience.

El tema de esta disertación, La poética del bolero en Cuba y Puerto Rico, es el resultado de nuestro interés por contestarnos algunas preguntas que por muchos años quisimos responder, aunque sus respuestas parecían evidentes para los estudios formales de la literatura cubana y la puertorriqueña. La pregunta generalizada era: ¿cuáles son los lazos culturales que unen las historias de Cuba y Puerto Rico? Las respuestas parecían encontrarse en la literatura y en la música. Es por esto que esta disertación resultó ser de carácter interdisciplinario al proponernos estudiar el género del “bolero” como fenómeno cultural poético-musical. El bolero resultó la excusa para asomarnos tanto a la historia de la literatura y la música cubana como puertorriqueña en busca de sus orígenes y desarrollo y con la intención de observar si de verdad exiten esos lazos culturales y cuáles son. Es por esto que el capítulo II pretende hacer un estudio minucioso sobre el Romanticismo en ambas islas. En éste establecemos cuáles son las poetas y músicos fundacionales en ambas naciones, sus estilos y sus propósitos. Sin pretender entrar en comparaciones vamos descubriendo los puntos de contacto que comienzan a enlazar culturalmente a ambas islas en los que el interés por definir “la nación” es el temas principal. La lucha por la definición, reafirmación y liberación nacional fue el motivo que generó muchos encuentros poéticos y musicales durante el siglo XIX. En el capítulo III repetimos la metodología del primero para estudiar el origen, desarrollo y culminación del movimiento Modernista en ambas naciones. Es en éste en el que desarrollamos el tema del bolero con más detalle porque es justo en este período de la historicidad de ambas naciones cuando el bolero alcanza su madurez. Con el objetivo de delinear los rasgos románticos o modernistas del bolero examinamos las letras de los boleros de los compositores más significativos, siguiendo el orden cronológico-historicista que la metodología de la investigación supone. El capítulo IV está dedicado a la aportación de las mujeres cubanas y puertorriqueñas tanto en el quehacer poético como musical-bolerístico. La mirada filosófica de este estudio intenta acercarse a los postulados que Gilles Deleuze asume en algunos de sus textos.

During the latter part of the 19th century, the Peruvian writer Ricardo Palma's Tradiciones peruanas, and the Cuban writer Julian del Casal's literary criticism, were widely read by many Latin Americans. Yet, some one hundred years later, Palma's work would be generally ignored by literary critics, though it would continue to be read and enjoyed by the general public. Del Casal's literary criticism would be completely forgotten, and the author himself would come to be viewed as an apolitical, anti-Cuban, escapist who accepted his country's colonial status without protesting. The present work constitutes a reevaluation of Palma's work and of del Casal's literary criticism, as well as of the latter's political involvement. A reading of Palma's Tradiciones peruanas based on the reading of Francois Rabelais' work carried out by Mikhail Bakhtin in his book Rabelais and His World, demonstrates that literary critics have been unjust with Palma by judging his work according to the canons and esthetics of refined, written literature, when in fact that work was meant to be popular, oral literature, with totally different literary characteristics and a totally different esthetic. Thus, the "defects" perceived by literary critics in Palma's work are really qualities and characteristics of popular, orally-oriented literature. Likewise, a reading of del Casal's "lost" critical prose, finally reedited in 1963 by the Cuban National Culture Council, demonstrates that he was very proud of being Cuban, much more political than is generally thought, and a patriot who risked his welfare by protesting his country's colonial condition. It also shows the excellence of his incisive and prophetic, modernist, literary criticism which called attention to the works of many new Latin American authors and made known to Latin Americans some of the most important European writers of his day.

No description available.

With the discovery of the earliest known manuscript version of Et les chiens se taisaient, we learn that Césaire had started thinking about the theater earlier than had been assumed, and most important, that he had originally envisioned this work as a historical drama based on the Haitian Revolution. “Migrant Textuality” explores the several versions and fragments of the play—from the manuscript to its last authorial instantiation in OEuvres Complètes in 1976—in order to shed light on the author’s troubled relationship with the history the play refers to and the historical circumstances of its production, and to outline a topology of the many migrations of text and documents in this monumental work. The first chapter reconstructs the genesis of the manuscript by careful analysis of the textual and material evidence. The second chapter grounds the first generic shift evinced by the work, from manuscript to the first published version in the poetry collection Les Armes miraculeuses, in the context of authorial responses to shifting editorial environments in the American hemisphere. The third chapter, “Legology,” departs from the particularity of the text to theorize textual blocks in general. The fourth chapter advocates for a form of reading that oscillates between macro- and microscopic approaches, using the topologies created in the previous chapter as proof-of-concept. The critical/digital work of the dissertation lays the foundation for a future digital edition of Césaire’s powerful poetic study of the radical anti-colonial rebel.

Recent scholarship on black transnationalism and diaspora in the early twentieth century has largely focused on migration to the urban centers of the US North and Western Europe. “Mapping the Global Black South: Aesthetics, Labor, and Diaspora” revises this discourse by exploring the movement of people, cultural practices, and ideas between the US South and the Caribbean as an alternative network of African diasporic affiliation. According to Caribbean theorist Édouard Glissant, “the Plantation system” created a “rhythm of economic production” and a “style of life” that links the US South to the Caribbean and parts of Latin America. Building on Glissant’s geographic frame, this dissertation establishes the plantation—a fundamentally modern form of labor organization—as the figural and literal organizing principle of “the global black south”: a matrix of diasporic articulation, subject formation, and knowledge and cultural production. Through close readings of works by Booker T. Washington, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Price-Mars, this study examines how African American and Caribbean writers and intellectuals mobilized aesthetics—literature, music, photographs, and performance—to imagine alternative futures within and against the legacy of the plantation. By drawing on theories of the plantation in Caribbean and New Southern Studies, “Mapping the Global Black South” makes critical interventions in the field of African American Studies, where the plantation is almost exclusively regarded as a metonym for slavery and anti-modernity. In Caribbean Studies, by contrast, scholars have proposed a more nuanced rendering of the plantation as the genesis of black modern life and culture, and in New Southern Studies, it has been reconceived as the link that tethers the US South to the global south (based on similar patterns of underdevelopment). Through an interdisciplinary and multimedia methodology, then, this study interrogates the paradox of the plantation as at once local and global, fecund and barren, static and fungible—as a site of agricultural production that animates the flow of global capital, on the one hand, and a modern technology of power that exploits the land and the bodies forced to work it, on the other. In so doing, it establishes the plantation as a matrix of global black south cultures that revises traditional understandings of black modernity and creates new systems of connectivity and legibility for contemporary scholarship. Moreover, in reconsidering the plantation as a crucible of black modernity, “Mapping the Global Black South” reconstructs the historical significance of the Tuskegee Institute—a former plantation turned industrial school—as a nodal point of black diasporic affiliation and a model for resolving one of the fundamental predicaments of New World blackness: the problem of free labor. Given that slavery was a system of coerced and exploitative labor, the greatest challenge of emancipation throughout the global black south was transforming a mass of formerly enslaved persons into autonomous workers. Thus, by the turn of the twentieth century, black artists and intellectuals from across the region began to embrace (and adapt) Booker T. Washington’s vision of an agrarian and industrial future (by way of Tuskegee) as a strategy for racial uplift and self-determination. Whereas Washington’s reformism is commonly reduced to a foil for W.E.B. Du Bois’ radicalism, this dissertation resituates Washington within a hemispheric framework to reconsider how his theories contribute to a more capacious epistemology of the “plantation” in African American Studies. “Mapping the Global Black South” is thus organized around two interrelated concerns: the plantation as an alternative framework of black transnationalism and a site of cultural production that evinces the persistence of black life within structures of social death; and Tuskegee’s significance as a symbol of modernity and a nodal point of diasporic articulation at the turn of the twentieth century. In so doing, it illuminates how the plantation shaped the new futures that emerged in the US South and the Caribbean in the aftermath of slavery.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI/Dissertation Abstracts International.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.