This thesis provides a comparative reading to selected writings from Anglophone Trinidadian writer Sam Selvon and Japanophone Taiwanese writer Weng Nao, demonstrating the link between these two authors’ specific representation of multiple diasporic models of Caribbean diaspora and Taiwanese diaspora respectively and its influence on diasporic identity narratives. This study provides a cross-linguistic/ cultural perspective on comparative postcolonial literary studies, which helps to move beyond the primary focus of Anglophone texts and contexts. Although the focused two authors Sam Selvon and Weng Nao come from different historical specificities and linguistic backgrounds that urge them produce their narratives in different ways and tones of tackling issues that they have encountered in each socio-political and cultural contexts respectively, their works provides outstanding examples of how contemporary diasporic routes—both geographically and metaphorically, have significant influence on literary productions that should not be categorised by its geographical or linguistic boundaries, and can only be fully understood by linking one to another from the legacies of colonialism and the triangle models of diasporic routes. The diasporic identity, as being illustrated in both of their works, has been evolved with geographical movements and transformed into an iconic concept that makes new forms of artistic production possible. Diasporic literature, therefore, should not be limited into traditional disciplinary compartmentalisation of national literary studies. By bringing the focus on the multiple diasporic journeys, the identity representation reflected in the literary work in this study helps to identify the complexity and boundary crossing within Anglophone literature and Japanophone literature, which have already transformed into literary works of being able to depict a more complex model of modern cultures—endless traveling and hybrid. By bringing forth the excluded Japanophone texts in the field of postcolonial studies to be compared with the texts from the prominent Anglophone postcolonial writer Sam Selvon, this thesis hopes to offer some insights into the reassessment of the literary status of Weng Nao and the significance of his works in the world literary stage, and, furthermore, to identify how Japanophone literary works might be compatible with postcolonial analysis.

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, In partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts in Translation, August 2017 / The purpose of this study is to present a descriptive and comparative analysis of the play of Aimé Césaire, La tragédie du roi Christophe and its translation by Breslin and Ney, with a particular focus on the rich translators’ notes that accompany the English version. The analysis explains the intended function of the translation and the stylistic stance adopted by the translators in rendering Césaire’s heteroglossic style. Postcolonial literature and the uniqueness of its translation, as well as the expansion of the Caribbean literature and the Négritude literature in terms of translation are approached in the study. Gérard Genette’s (1997) model is used to examine the paratextual elements, while Vinay and Darbelnet’s (1995) model serves to analyse the translation of the play from French into English. / XL2018

Este trabalho apresenta ao leitor de língua portuguesa a tradução da obra crioula Antan denfance, de Patrick Chamoiseau. Para melhor compreensão dos aspectos linguísticos e extralinguísticos do livro, desenvolvemos um estudo inicial, dividido em três capítulos, que obedece ao percurso: contexto histórico, autor e obra. O primeiro capítulo contempla a história da Martinica, desde os primeiros habitantes até a colonização francesa, evidenciando as principais consequências do movimento colonizador no que diz respeito ao ser, ao espaço e à língua. No segundo capítulo, traçamos um perfil do autor, apresentando um pouco da sua produção intelectual, sua participação no movimento literário da crioulidade e seu projeto literário, de maneira a ressaltar suas peculiaridades estilísticas. O terceiro capítulo destina-se a refletir sobre as competências necessárias ao tradutor de obras culturalmente marcadas, analisando não somente as nossas principais escolhas tradutológicas, como a característica mais elementar de Antan denfance: o enraizamento na tradição oral. / This paper presents to Portuguese-speaking readers the translation of the Creole work Antan denfance, by Patrick Chamoiseau. For better understanding of linguistic and extralinguistic aspects of this book, we developed an initial study, divided into three chapters, which follows this path: historical context, author and work. The first chapter covers the History of Martinique, from the earliest inhabitants to the French colonization, highlighting the main consequences of the colonization movement to the individuals, the space and the language. In the second chapter, we have compiled a profile of the author, where we introduce some of his intellectual production, his participation in the créolité literary movement and his literary project, in order to emphasize his stylistic peculiarities. The third chapter intends to examine the skills necessary to translate culturally marked works, by analyzing not only our main choices of translation, but also the most elementary aspect of this work: rooting in oral tradition.

This dissertation examines how contemporary narrative fiction in French and Spanish represents experiences of migration and the circulation of capital and goods in the globalized Atlantic. I argue that the attempt to imagine an increasingly globalized world has been accompanied by a waning interest in character development and an increased interest in what could be characterized as the spatial dimension of literature. Many recent `global fictions' present readers with impenetrable characters whose interiority is inaccessible. The lack of depth is, however, replaced by geographical breadth. As characters move through space, bringing into relation several different geographical locations, authors draw attention to transnational sites of marginalization and imagine alternative power configurations. Several important studies have examined the engagement of Francophone writers with globalization in the late 20th and early 21st century. While these readings are sophisticated and persuasive, they remain confined within the Francophone context, rarely establishing comparisons with the Anglophone and the Hispanophone contexts. We thus end up with somewhat contradictory concepts such as Francophone or Hispanophone transnationalism,`world literature' and globalization. This seems even more paradoxical given that several Francophone writers, including Maryse Condé and Edouard Glissant, have set their novels in non-Francophone countries. My dissertation undertakes translinguistic literary criticism in order to address this gap in critical discourse. I limit my focus to what I term the Atlantic world economy, that is, the countries touched by the Atlantic triangle and marked by a history of population displacement and cultural mixing inaugurated through colonial slavery. The authors I have selected position their work in the Atlantic framework. Some more explicitly, like Fatou Diome whose novel is entitled The belly of the Atlantic. Others, like Maryse Condé and Roberto Bolaño, by moving protagonists between some of the major centers of the Atlantic economy. They all, however, pose the question of a globalized Atlantic, distancing themselves from the Atlantic as a triangular space, and reframing it as a space encompassing many poles. The notion of the globalized Atlantic further underscores the tension between a regional framework and a globalized world within which these authors are operating. At the turn of the 21st century movements resisting the effects of global capitalism have come into existence in several countries, including Egypt, Chile, the United States, Brazil and Turkey. These modes of activism require us to recalibrate some of our geopolitical categories as a way of thinking about transnational citizenship. The authors in my corpus deploy literary strategies that complement the activism of global socioeconomic and political movements. This dissertation focuses on their imagining of narrative fiction as a space that is both globalized and resistant to the dominant political and economic dimensions of globalization.

abstract: Las Islas Canarias son un archipiélago de la costa africana situado a cien kilómetros de la costa de Marruecos y del Sáhara Occidental. Estas islas fueron conquistadas a finales del siglo XV y son actualmente parte del Estado español, y su posición como punto de paso tricontinental ha facilitado una historia colonial que es paralela a la del Caribe y que está caracterizada por la asimilación de sus poblaciones indígenas, las plantaciones de caña de azúcar y el comercio esclavista atlántico, la emergencia de un Nuevo Mundo, las migraciones constantes desde las Islas Canarias hacia el Caribe, el desarrollo de movimientos independentistas y la turistificación del paraíso caribeño/canario, entre otros aspectos. La identidad de las Islas Canarias, si embargo, ha permanecido en una posición ambigua en la discusión de conceptos de tricontinentalidad o puente entre continentes, cuando estas islas no son simplemente consideradas como una región más de España con ligeras diferencias. Desde el Caribe, varios autores regionales han cuestionado sus propias identidades proponiendo los conceptos de creolización, relación o meta-archipiélago. Las ideas comunes exploradas por intelectuales de ambos archipiélagos incluyen los conceptos de colonialidad, modernidad, mitologización de la isla, fragmentación, atlanticidad, frontera y ultraperiferia, entre otros. De esta manera, esta tesis doctoral conecta las Islas Canarias y el Caribe a través de la exploración de sus discursos identitarios, y aplica a Canarias las teorías poscoloniales desarrolladas en el Caribe. Partiendo del análisis de diversos trabajos de Fernando Ortiz, Antonio S. Pedreira, Édouard Glissant, Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphael Confiant, Antonio Benítez Rojo, José Luis González, Juan Flores, Gustavo Pérez-Firmat, Walter Mignolo, Enrique Dussel, Gloria Anzaldúa y Juan Manuel García Ramos, entre otros, esta tesis propone el término canaribeñidad para definir el desarrollo bilateral y común de las identidades nacionales en las Islas Canarias y el Caribe, destacando la contribución canaria a la identidad caribeña (la fundación de la literatura cubana, el guajiro/jíbaro, la brujería…) y viceversa (discursos independentistas y nacionalistas, la experiencia diaspórica, la música, el tabaco, el sentido de fraternidad con el Caribe…). El corpus analizado en esta disertación incluye obras literarias transatlánticas, desde las primeras crónicas hasta ejemplos de teatro, novelas, ensayos, artículos periodísticos y poesía de los siglos XVI-XX. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Spanish 2019

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.

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The novel shows how a young Indo-Guyanese immigrant to the UK is racialized; aspiring to leave behind the "messiness" and confusion of the poverty-stricken immigrant lives he sees around him, he goes to Cambridge. The story is narrated by this character long after, in ways that reveal how this aspiration was assimilative and colonizing, encouraging him to abandon his friends and his roots. His life story makes it clear how different systems of racial categorization work in Guyana and in the UK to violently separate those who might be friends, lovers, and allies.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Cornell University, 2006. / (UMI)AAI3237639. Adviser: Molly Hite. Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-10, Section: A, page: 3809.

Thesis (doctoral)--Université des Antilles et de La Guyane, 1996-1997. / "Juillet 2000"--Colophon. At head of title: Groupe de recherche et d'étude des littératures et civilisations de la Caraïbe et des Amériques noires (GRELCA). Includes bibliographical references (p. 389-412) and index.