This study examines the novels of Caryl Phillips, J. M. Coetzee, and Michael Ondaatje, writers originally from post-colonial countries—St. Kitts, South Africa, and Sri Lanka respectively—who explore the ambivalences engendered by colonialism rather than conforming to a one-dimensional understanding of postcolonial literature which focuses exclusively on the reactionary nature of this type of writing. What enables these writers to transcend the simple binarisms of colonizer and colonized and to concentrate on the ambiguities of the postcolonial condition is their use of postmodern stylistic elements which emphasize complexity and irresolution. Phillips embraces postmodern fragmentation by segmenting his fiction into multiple, often unrelated stories. In opting to juxtapose fragments of stories, Phillips matches his narrative form to his thematic interest in the dislocation experienced by people of the African diaspora. The first chapter examines The Final Passage, Higher Ground, and The Nature of Blood to demonstrate that fragmentation becomes more deeply embedded in Phillips's narrative structure as his novels advance. Coetzee's fiction is reflective of a postmodern aesthetic in its unreliability and indeterminancy. This stylistic feature enables Coetzee to address postcolonial concerns in South Africa where the reliability of any subject position has been undermined by rigid racial divisions. The second chapter analyzes Coetzee's various types of narrative voices: the untrustworthy narrator whose views are clearly objectionable (Dusklands); the unreliable narrator whose perspective is limited (Waiting for the Barbarians); and the unreadable narrator who escapes any certainties (Life & Times of Michael K). The third chapter explores Michael Ondaatje's use of a self-conscious playfulness with language. Ondaatje incorporates magic realism, intertextuality, and a poetic perspective in his novels, which are either situated in one particular setting (In the Skin of a Lion) or in a plurality of locals (The English Patient, to highlight the bizarre and traumatic circumstances that mark the postcolonial experience of exile and to depict the way that his characters' lives tend to be mythic in scale as a consequence. In turning to the intersection of the postmodern and the postcolonial, Phillips, Coetzee, and Ondaatje convey a highly nuanced understanding of postcolonial existence and of the human condition.

Virginia Woolf dates the beginning of modernity “In or about December, 1910,” when “human character changed.” This change appears first not in the writer’s study, nor the cosmopolitan metropole. It begins in the servants’ hall, when a cook leaves the kitchen and unexpectedly crosses the threshold to chat with her mistress in the drawing-room. This dissertation examines novels by four modernist women writers: Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Nella Larsen, and Jean Rhys. Their texts demonstrate that the influence of domesticity and domestic servants on modernist fiction both appears in the content of the novels and pervades their forms. Analyzing the depictions and deployments of domestic servants in modernist fiction reveals how the structure of modernist formal experimentation can be read as a reaction to, and as an often-uncomfortable negotiation with, those servants’ still-necessary presences in the house of fiction. A new way of engaging with modernist fiction, and particularly with modernist fiction written by women, is at stake in this study. These writers’ encounters with the intersections of modernism, domesticity, and the labor of domestic servants lead to two types of structural innovations. One adopts some of the characteristics of servant labor into the shape of narrative, as seen in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse and Stein’s Three Lives. The other, which surfaces in Larsen’s Passing and Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, mirrors the central characters’ myopia and paranoia about the meaning and controllability of that labor. Both of these narrative types center on representations of and control over the space of the threshold, and the concept of the threshold centers my argument. The threshold as physical and psychological space takes on a new resonance in modernism, as seemingly stable divisions within personal and national spaces begin to shift under the pressure of modernity. Attention to liminality also refocuses attention on those servant characters who open doors, who stand at and cross these crucial thresholds. All four novelists recognize and dramatize the degree to which the employer class is dependent upon the labor and the loyalty of their servants. Their formal experiments reveal how each grapples with this dependence.

“Creolization, Possession, and Performances in Caribbean Cultural Discourses” entails an intercultural, interdisciplinary investigation of the motifs of spiritual and bodily possession in historic and contemporary discourses of Caribbean cultures. Through a multifaceted analysis of literary, visual, oral, and performative texts, I emphasize the manner in which the historically-rooted tensions of possession invite a more complex understanding of the dynamics of creolization—or the amalgamation of racial, ethnic, and religious identities—in the Caribbean. The conflicts engendered by spiritual and bodily possession connote the crossroads, or the metaphorical site of racial, cultural, linguistic, and religious interchange analogous to the post-Columbian Caribbean region. In my analyses I problematize the discourses of creolization by highlighting the tensions and resistance that are deeply embedded in the crossroads, and which are most prominently revealed through the motifs of spiritual and bodily possession. ^ The introductory chapter provides an overview of post-Columbian Caribbean histories and Caribbean cultural discourses. Chapter 1 examines the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre, Patroness Saint of Cuba, and the orisha Ochún, the Afro-Cuban deity syncretized with the Virgin of Charity in Cuban history and folklore. Chapter 2 continues the investigation of racialized, gendered archetypes of femininity in Cuban culture with an emphasis on visual religious culture and the aesthetics of feminine sweetness in Cuba and Puerto Rico. Chapter 3 analyzes spiritual possession as a pathway to health and transcendence, with an emphasis on several novels by Cuban-born writer Mayra Montero, whose early literature invokes the Haitian religious experience. In Chapter 4 I ponder the prevalence of haunting feminine figures in Caribbean literatures and folklores while drawing attention to Franco-Caribbean cultural discourses. Chapter 5 examines maternality in contemporary literatures by Afro-Caribbean women, and the discourses of the heroic male Caribbean maroon that frequently disavow the heroism of Afro-Caribbean mothers. In Chapter 6 I consider globalization, diasporas, and Caribbean nationalisms while focusing on Trinidad Carnival as a performative spectacle that paradigmatically dramatizes the racial, cultural, and gendered tensions of Caribbean creolization. The concluding chapter offers some insights on the directions in which Caribbean cultural studies and cultural praxis may develop in the future. ^

This study is an interpretation of the poetic work of the Puerto Rican poet Francisco Matos Paoli from 1937 to 1962 focusing on the creation and metamorphorsis of the poetic voice. This approach views the poetic voice as a linguistic device, autonomous from the real author. It establishes a distance between the I of the poem and the concept of mask or persona. The study interprets the poetic voice as a combination of several poetic modes which represent different accents in the major ideological perspectives of the discourse. The various modes of the poetic, patriotical, metaphysical I (subdivided into Christian, spiritualist and espiritista I), and the family I (subdivided into father, son, brother and lover) constitute the space of the poetic voice as one of tension between these discourses. These modes of the poetic voice express the basic binary opposition life/death which is transformed as it passes through the various books according to the movement of the poetic modes and their discourses. In Cardo labriego (1937) the opposition life/death begins in the first part of the book assuming the form of the opposition productivity/dearth. In Habitante del eco (1944) and Teoria del olvido (1944) the basic opposition is in the context of the spiritualist communication between the world of "here" and the world of "beyond." In Canto a Puerto Rico (1952), Luz de los heroes (1954), and Canto nacional a Borinquen (1982) written in 1955, the opposition life-death becomes the opposition freedom/colonialism. In Criatura del rocio (1958) the opposition uses the Christian signs in the context of espiritista communication. Finally, in Canto de la locura (1962) the different forms of opposition are all present in an attempt to reconcile them in the utopian space of the poetic voice. This reading of Matos Paoli's poetic journey comes to the conclusion that during this period of poetic production the discourse of the poet is creating a poetics based on a demand made of the reader. The implicit reader of this poetry knows the various contexts of the several modes of the poetic voice.

La lirica de Dulce Maria Loynaz (Cuba 1902) ha sido considerada por el canon academico como perteneciente al post-modernismo hispanoamericano. Tal lectura no satisface la plenitud metaforica que la constituye. Esta disertacion propone una relectura de su obra lirica desde las teorias de Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray y Julia Kristeva en torno a la identidad femenina. Se inicia con dos capitulos socio-historicos. El primero revisa la aportacion lirica de las mujeres poetas cubanas al canon literario desde sus camienzos hasta la generacion de Loynaz. Para la organicazion del esquema generacional se sigue a Raimundo Lazo. A caballo entre el post-modernismo y la vanguardia, el segundo capitulo analiza la produccion de estos movimientos en Cuba, deteniendose en unas consideraciones sobre la "poesia pura", para concluir que la lirica de Loynaz amplifica su poder significativo si se plantea su lectura desde los presupuestos de la Modernidad. Loynaz utiliza su textualidad poetica para disenar un Imaginario o identidad femenina basado en la liberacion de los presupuestos patriarcales que lo configuran tradicionalmente. Su estrategia reside en la metaforizacion acuatica, desde la que el yo lirico, paradojicamente, al adquirir una posicion marginal alcanza la integridad deseada. En una combinacion con imagenes de aire se desarrollan instancias misticas que contribuyen a la ausencia de limites. Lo inefable de la experiencia mistica se textualiza en el poema a traves de la liquidificacion. Al recuperar la voz a traves de la metafora, la voz lirica lleva a cabo un des-exilio, una ruptura de la especularidad que le hacia ser imagen de otro. Se copia la mimica del proceso mistico pero se transgrede pues, al alejarse del silencio, se lleva a cabo un proceso de des-histerizacion en la voz lirica. El pensamiento binario se suspende y se pasa a la fluidez. En la asimilacion de la tradicion literaria femenina que le precede, Loynaz recoge el misticismo de La Avellaneda, de Juana Borrero y de Emilia Bernal, para innovarlo a nivel estructural y otorgarle la dinamicidad de los enclaves liquidos en la constitucion del Imaginario femenino.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuban filmmakers had to rethink the socialist values and esthetics developed in Cuba after the revolution of 1959. A number of these precepts, encapsulated in Julio García Espinosa's 1965 manifesto "For an Imperfect Cinema," had been influential in both Cuban filmmaking and Latin America's socialist cinema in general. As a consequence of capitalist globalization, many of these cultural concepts had to be reinvented for a new, more skeptical era disinclined to romanticize their legacy. This dissertation opens a discussion of the heritage of Cuban cinema in Latin American culture through an examination of the post-Soviet production of Cuban filmmakers working within the framework of the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC). An analysis of the films of Daniel Díaz Torres, Juan Carlos Tabío, Tomás Gutíerrez Alea, Humberto Solás, and Fernando Pérez traces these directors' struggle to create a new film vocabulary that depicts more accurately Cuban reality while remaining committed to revolutionary ideals. Further, the dissertation examines the reconstruction of history through the epic film adaptation of Alejo Carpentier's El siglo de las luces, and through Juan Padrón's animated features. It then reflects on issues of gender, auteurism, and superstardom centered on the persona of actor Jorge Perrugoría, as it speculates on the new path that Cuban cinema may follow in the 21st century with the new system of coproductions with countries such as Spain and Germany. In order to explore the changes in the Cuban film industry outlined above, I deconstruct the cultural and visual language developed by the Revolution. Drawing on the ideas of major schools of criticism such as Structuralism, Post-Modernism, Marxism, and Post-Colonialism, I prove that, while Marxist legacy is an essential part of the island's heritage, the multiethnic nature of Cuban culture is too complex to be limited or reduced to a single philosophy. This supports my argument that the Revolution's survival and finding its new place in the international community depends in part on an evolution from its original precepts, including an open dialogue with the other aspects of Cuban reality that constitute the fabric of the island's society.

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In this thesis I investigate connections between modern Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean fiction between the 1950s and the present. My study brings into focus literary representations of inter-related histories and cultures and problematises the fragmentation of Caribbean studies into separate academic disciplines. The disciplinary compartmentalisation of Caribbean studies into English studies on the one hand and French and Francophone studies on the other has contributed to a reading of Caribbean literature within separate linguistic spheres. This division is strikingly reflected in the scarcity of any sustained literary criticism that acknowledges cultural and literary interpenetration within the archipelago. My comparative study of selected Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean fiction allows me to account for the ethnic, cultural, linguistic and historical diversity of Caribbean societies while, at the same time, foregrounding their inter-relatedness. Through a series of specific case studies the thesis illuminates ways in which theoretical concepts and literary tropes have travelled within the archipelago. Through a close reading of selected narrative fiction I will contextualise and analyse significant underlying linguistic, ethnic and cultural links between the various Caribbean societies which are largely based on the shared history of slavery, colonialism and decolonisation processes. The themes of migration, transformation and creolisation will be at the centre of my investigation. Chapter One establishes the historical and literary-critical framework for this thesis by engaging with key developments in Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean writing from the 1920s until the present. My comparison of the most influential trends in both Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature and criticism from the discourse of négritude to postcolonial studies seeks to highlight connections between these two linguistically divided fields of study. The analysis of Caribbean fiction in Chapters Two to Four pursues such theoretical, stylistic and thematic links further. Chapter Two challenges the conception of postwar Antillean and West Indian writing produced in the metropolis as distinct literary canons by drawing attention to thematic connections between the two traditions. Through the comparison of The Lonely Londoners by Samuel Selvon and La Fête à Paris by Joseph Zobel it argues that these continuities represent a wider trend in ‘black European’ writing. Chapter Three examines concepts of cultural identity which have been central to Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature and criticism during the last two decades. Specifically it focuses on the notions of hybridity, créolité/creoleness and créolisation/creolisation which it discusses in relation to Robert Antoni’s novel Divina Trace and Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco. The final chapter focuses on Shani Mootoo’s and Gisèle Pineau’s representations of specific female experiences of trauma which are related to reiterated colonial violence. Their fictional portrayal of suppressed memories can be read in light of recent critical debates about a collective remembrance of the history of slavery and colonialism.