<p> Junot Diaz&rsquo;s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, <i>The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao</i>, is examined as an encyclopedic work of literature and science fiction. In chapter one, this exploration focuses on the fuku as a post-colonial explanation of diaspora, utilizing postmemory to pass on a history of the Americas to future generations. Chapter two transitions into a discussion problematizing assimilation and hybridity, specifically focusing on Oscar and Yunior, attempting to define and understand what Diaz, himself, has pronounced as masculine subjectivities within the novel.</p><p>

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.

In this study I provide close textual analysis of the novels of three women writers whose work displays a consistent preoccupation with issues of race, and examine the ways in which their racial representations interplay with their depictions of gender and sexuality. Writing from a consciously gendered and racialized position, I combine personal narrative with theoretical discussion as I trace common racial themes, such as racial violence, cross-racial couples, and the denial or erasure of race. In an examination of other critics who have employed personal narrative as a form of literary analysis, I affirm the value of teaching and reading literary texts as a mode of activism. I also examine the depiction of white male protagonists, exploring the ways in which such depictions require a transracial, cross-gender performance on the part of the woman writer. Recurring patterns of racial dynamics emerge in the larger body of each author's work. A West Indian female racial identity emerges in Rhys' work as, consciously and unconsciously, her white heroines identify with black slave women, and seek another form of "blackness" through alcoholic oblivion. Gordimer's white women seek to slough off the racial privilege they are only too aware of, but Gordimer creates narratives in which white female identity merges textually with black male identity and black female identity, linguistically and through shared political action. Morrison's black women, doubly othered by race and by gender, seek to transcend all boundaries through wildly transgressive behavior, enacted boldly or imagined through language. In my final chapter, I explore the ambiguities and struggles of the construction of female racial identity in American, South African and Caribbean contexts, with particular attention to moments of textual rupture which signal the possibility of fluid identity. I demonstrate how Morrison, Gordimer, and Rhys employ a variety of narrative forms which allow readers to enter an in-between space, a starting point for the transformation of consciousness and of society. Literature is an ideal vehicle for entering the in-between space imaginatively, and dwelling there longer and longer as we rid ourselves of preconceived notions of race and gender.

This study reveals the differences and similarities among U.S. Latino and Spanish American literatures. This is achieved through the juxtaposition and dialogue among Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban; Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory and Days of Obligation ; Rosario Castellano's Balún Canán, and Reinaldo Arenas' Antes que anochezca. In choosing texts from Mexico and Cuba we are seeking to reveal contrasts and links with the Chicano and Cuban-American narratives. Similarly, by selecting said texts and authors, there is a balance between issues of sexual gender and orientation, as well as in regards to the original language in which the texts were conceived. In their quest for identity from a marginal starting point, all four authors aim to create a response to hegemony. We approach these texts from the theoretical parameters of the studies of autobiography, with a special emphasis on Bildungsroman, since their protagonists see their self-formation as a process that would enable them to behave in a functional manner in the communities they are immersed. It is from this marginal position that values such as family and education question the power of traditional hegemony. Another element that subverts the establishment is the treatment of gender and sexuality in the texts. Since the protagonists' identity is conceived from a women's or a homosexual standpoint, traditional values are questioned. Finally, the analysis of the texts deals with their relationship to the imagined national space. Castellanos and Rodriguez approach the concept of nation though the indigenous question. Garcia and Arenas relate to Cuba by way of their comment on the Castrist Revolution. The different narratives of the self that make up this study place their voices in the intestitial space of the periphery. It is from that space that they address the center in a variety of ways.

This dissertation examines how the work of four Puerto Rican poets – Julia de Burgos, Clemente Soto Vélez, Martín Espada, and Naomi Ayala – demonstrates a poetics of resistance. While resistance takes a variety of forms in their poetic discourse, this project asserts that these poets have and continue to play an integral role in the cultural decolonization of Puerto Rico, which has been generally unacknowledged in both the critical scholarship on their work and the narrative of Puerto Rico’s anti-colonial struggle. Chapter One discuses the theoretical concepts used in defining a poetics of resistance, including Barbara Harlow’s definition of resistance literature, Edward Said’s concepts of cultural decolonization, and Jahan Ramazani’s theory of transnational poetics. Chapter Two provides an overview of Puerto Rico’s unique political status and highlights several pivotal events in the nation’s history, such as El Grito de Lares, the Ponce Massacre, and the Vieques Protest to demonstrate the continuity of the Puerto Rican people’s resistance to oppression and attempted subversion of their colonial status. Chapter Three examines Julia de Burgos’ understudied poems of resistance and argues that she employs a rhetoric of resistance through the use of repetition, personification, and war imagery in order to raise the consciousness of her fellow Puerto Ricans and to provoke her audience into action. By analyzing Clemente Soto Vélez’s use of personification, anaphora, and most importantly, juxtaposition, Chapter Four demonstrates that his poetry functions as a dialectical process and contends that the innovative form he develops throughout his poetic career reinforces his radical perspective for an egalitarian society. Chapter Five illustrates how Martín Espada utilizes rich metaphor, sensory details, and musical imagery to foreground issues of social class, racism, and economic exploitation across geographic, national, and cultural borders. Chapter six traces Naomi Ayala’s feminist discourse of resistance that denounces social injustice while simultaneously expressing a female identity that seeks liberation through her understanding of history, her reverence for memory, and her relationship with the earth. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that Burgos, Soto Vélez, Espada, and Ayala not only advocate for but also enact resistance and social justice through their art.