How are music, literature and migration connected? How are these transnational conversations affecting the way countries construct their national discourses today? This dissertation studies how gender and race are constructed and questioned in the 'cross-genre' dialogue among contemporary urban literature, performance, and reggaeton music produced in Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and New York City from the1990s-2000s. This ongoing dialogue of marginalized music and literature, made possible by the accessibility of new media, results in a unique urban configuration in which gender and racial identities are negotiated, resulting in the reinforcement of a trans-Caribbean cultural circuit. Following a non-traditional structural approach this dissertation proposes a new analytical and reading model beginning with the Puerto Rican diaspora's cultural production in New York City as a point of departure, and from there expands to the rest of the Spanish Caribbean. I specifically focus on the writings of poets Willie Perdomo (NYC), and Guillermo Rebollo Gil (PR), the videos and lyrics of the reggaeton artists Tego Calderón and Calle 13 (PR), and the music and literary work of Rita Indiana Hernández (DR) in order analyze the complex interplay between music and literary texts to convey gender and racial imaginaries. I conclude that these literary, cultural, and performative texts abolish "national" configurations and are being replaced by broader definitions of "us," race, and gender to address the complexities of contemporary Caribbean transnational identitary circuits. / text

My dissertation Sea-ing Words: An Exploration of the Maritime in Contemporary Caribbean and Latino/a Literature analyzes how writers from the Spanish-speaking islands and their diaspora have moved past the ever elusive Pan-Antillean quest for unity, rooted in the acceptance of a foundational Trauma (with a capital T). The writers I examine venture to humanize the basin, highlighting the routes, exchanges, and negotiations that currently distinguish the region. In doing so, the idea of one edifying Trauma is displaced by the existence of multiple and individualized iterations. As marginalized discourses infiltrate the center, the flow of the conversation is altered, opening up spaces for new interactions. Through their uses of the maritime, these writers transform the sea into a stage from which new perspectives on Caribbean and Latino/a literature emanate. / Romance Languages and Literatures

This study engages with select disease narratives of the Anglophone Caribbean through the lens of post/colonial theory, cultural criticism and the social history of medicine. Focusing on the biological image and metaphor of infection, as opposed to its more popular associations with hybridity and creolization in post/colonial theory, I argue that disease discourses facilitate more complex iterations of identity than the less dynamic, more static categories of ‘race’ (black versus white), cultural affiliation (British, Indian, African or West Indian) or political identity (coloniser versus colonised) and propose a theory of infectious entanglements, by which I demonstrate and interrogate complex and transphenomenal representations of West Indian identity across ‘racial’, cultural and political boundaries. Primary texts include eighteenth- and nineteenth-century medical tracts on leprosy and tropical fevers; contemporary medical and cultural texts on HIV/AIDS; and works of fiction by writers such as Harold Sonny Ladoo (Trinidad/Canada), Frieda Cassin (Britain/Antigua) Lawrence Scott (Trinidad/Britain) and Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua/United States). My literary, cultural and historical analyses of biological representations of leprosy, tropical fever and HIV/AIDS suggest that each disease facilitated the construction of multiple cordons sanitaires, whose conceptual boundaries intersected and overlapped in different ways. These points of entanglement, I demonstrate, are useful sites for interrogating post/colonial constructions of identity in light of the relative fluidity of some boundaries (such as changing ideas about who is infectious and who can become infected, as with HIV/AIDS and leprosy) and the hardening lines of others (such as intersecting ideas about tropical fever, pathogenic environments and the emergence of medical cartography). More importantly, such intersections sometimes revealed the entanglement of medicine and other organs of post/colonial authority in past and ongoing othering projects and their legitimising roles in the articulation of essential difference. This dissertation is divided into three parts, each focusing on a particular disease that is iconic in post/colonial narratives about the Caribbean. Part 1 focuses on leprosy, Part 2 on tropical fever and Part 3, framed as a conclusion to this study, focuses on contemporary narratives of HIV/AIDS in the context of earlier narratives of leprosy and tropical fevers. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2010-11-24 21:35:20.277

Thesis--Cornell University. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 282-287).

Thesis--Cornell University. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 282-287).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1971. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliography.

This dissertation presents a study of carnavalesque parody in three works by Virgilio Pinera. The first chapter consists of a study of the genesis of the master narratives of literary modernity in Latin America as formulated in the writings of Jose Marti and elaborated by the arielista writers in the first decades of the century. The chapter also includes a study of the literary group Origenes to which Virgilio Pinera belonged and a brief biographical essay about the author. The second chapter begins with a study of the theory of parody based on the theoretical writings of Linda Hutcheon. This study is followed by an analysis of the short story "El album" as a parody of the cuban neobarroque, an aesthetic shared by some of the members of Origenes. The chapter concludes with a study of the novel La carne de Rene as a padody of the Buildungsroman and of the master narratives of Latin American literaty modernity. The third chapter begins with a study of the popular tradition in Cuban theatre which was influential in the development of Virgilio Pinera's theories about theatre. This study is followed by a comparative study of Tembladera, a play by Juan Antonio Ramos which is based on the arielista modern ideology, and Electra Garrigo, Pinera's first play. The final chapter includes the conclusions of this dissertation.

Esta disertacion estudia dos novelas de Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda y dos de Reinaldo Arenas: Guatimozin, ultimo emperador de Mexico (1846) y El cacique de Turmeque (1860), y El mundo alucinante (1969) y La Loma del Angel (1987). En tanto novelas historicas que son tambien re-escritura, este estudio examina junto con ellas sus hipotextos y metatextos: la Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva Espana (Bernal Diaz), las Cartas de relacion (Cortes) y El carnero (Freile); las Memorias de S.Teresa de Mier, Cecilia Valdes (Villaverde), El siglo de las luces (Carpentier) y Biografia de un cimarron (Barnet). La lectura de estos textos se realize siguiendo principalmente los postulados teoricos de Benedict Anderson, Foucault, Genette, Hutcheon y Hayden White. Las novelas de Avellaneda y Arenas son analizadas dentro de sus respectivos contextos de fundacion nacional: la poetica romantica cubana de mediados del siglo XIX y la poetica de la Revolucion (1959). A Avellaneda y Arenas los une el hecho de ser dos escritores cubanos excluidos del grupo fundacional: Avellaneda como mujer que se niega a cumplir la funcion asignada a su sexo, y Arenas como cuidadano cuyas necesidades y deseos--los del homosexual, entre otros--no coinciden con los del ente abstracto de "el Pueblo". Sin embargo tambien ellos escriben novelas historicas: sus textos hacen parte del discurso sobre la nacion, si bien cuestionando sus supuestos de manera radical y haciendo patentes sus contradicciones. En buena medida para estos autores la realidad son textos: textos que son tema de su excritura y escritura que deviene por tanto re-escritura. La historia que escriben no es la nunca antes contada, sino la historia de como ese relato ha sido escrito; y es tambien la historia que quiere volver a contar el acontecimiento porque no comparte el relato que de el se ha hecho. Las novelas historicas de Avellaneda y Arenas son asi relatos escritos en contra de la historiografia patriarcal y evolutiva que homogeniza la realidad a costa de sus particularidades, y trivializa sus proyectos.

In this dissertation, I explore the connections between three post-colonial epics: James Joyce's Ulysses, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, and Derek Walcott's Omeros. Each work focuses on the disruption and loss that has occurred respectively in Ireland, India, and the Caribbean because of each country's encounter with the colonizing force of England. Out of this experience are born narrators who must contend with the fact of a hybridized and contentious inheritance as they struggle to articulate their experiences as members of nations gaining their political freedom. Using a blend of both European and indigenous theorists, I argue that by actively cultivating a stance of hybridity, these works use what Homi Bhabha has termed “border terrain” to locate new nations, along the lines of Benedict Anderson's “imagined communities,” that attempt to evade the prescriptiveness of both colonialism and emergent nationalism. Rather than continuing the Manichean Dichotomy used by English colonizers to subdue and divide indigenous populations, Joyce, Rushdie, and Walcott offer narratives that encompass elements from both colonial and indigenous inheritances in a volatile mixture. Having inherited a fractured and contentious world of narrative exclusion, the characters of Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, Saleem Sinai, Achille, and Major Plunkett actively transgress the boundaries between narratives, looking for dialogue and connection. Ultimately, the endings of the three texts provide clues toward a future where Edward Said's notion of reading and hearing “contrapuntally” will reflect both the multiplicity and the contentiousness of the post-colonial inheritance.

The dissertation examines the nomadism of contemporary migrant writers who deliberately resist location and deterritorialize the dérive and déracinement of the nomad. Through nomadism, these writers elude the fixed identity categories—le nègre, le migrant, l'autre—often imposed on them by the country of adoption. These three writers—Edwidge Danticat, Dany Laferrière, and Linda Lê—each write out the diasporic and exilic dislocations of nomadism: linguistic, geopolitical and schizo-social. The hybrid methodology informing this study includes postcolonial, poststructuralist and feminist theories. The first four chapters establish the theoretical parameters for reading nomadic literatures, and the final chapter offers nomadic readings of contemporary Haitian and Vietnamese migrant literatures in France, Quebec, and the United States. These subtitles are problematic; yet, I theoretically problematize these terms and the national boundaries (geopolitical, psychological, and schizo-social) that they signify. Thus, the terms—Vietnamese and Haitian, specifically as situated in France, Québec and the United States of America—are read less as discrete geographical or national domains, and more as a transmuting (if also transnationalist) impulse, a setting of the two states into creative tension. I examine the multi-cultural and plurilingual ‘border crossings’ which occur in nomadic migrant writers, such as Lê, who writes out the linguistic and identitary vicissitudes of migration. Similarly, I explore how two francophone Haitian writers—an émigré in Québec (Laferrière) and the other a refugee/immigrant in the United States (Danticat)—take flight in different languages: the first in a minor usage of French, the latter in a minor usage of English. My analysis of these writers emphasizes several core themes: espaces exilaires; the deterritorialization of fixed identitary categories (whether around issues of gender, nationality, sexuality, or race); the destabilization of language, both the mother-tongue and the colonial (‘colonizing’) language; and the literary and cultural nomadism of migrant writers who ultimately resist immigration. Each migrant writer nomadically deterritorializes the spaces and tropes of migratory writing—territories of old, new, natal, adopted, native, acquired, immigrant, migrant and citizen. Through my readings, I show that even in texts by migrant writers, who move from one place to another, a sort of nomadism persists.