O ‘Parsley Massacre’ – o assassinato de haitianos que viviam na República Dominicana em 1937 – é o tema de The farming of bones (1998), escrito por Edwidge Danticat, que oferece ao leitor o testemunho ficcional de uma sobrevivente da violência do genocídio. De forma similar, em Solar storms (1995), Linda Hogan faz a descendente de um povo que foi massacrado a protagonista de uma busca pelo passado e pela história de seu povo. Ambos os romances empregam estratégias narrativas em busca da representação ficcional do trauma como experiência pessoal e coletiva, implicando o leitor na produção de sentido (CARUTH 1996; FREUD; 1920). É através do recordar e reviver o passado que os sujeitos traumatizados podem tentar compreender sua situação presente e reivindicar uma identidade para si mesmos (HALL, 2006). A revisão do passado, e precisamente de um passado silenciado, proporciona que as vozes de uma comunidade possam ser ouvidas e suas histórias trazidas à luz. Nesse estudo, eu busco investigar de que forma tais histórias são construídas, quais seus efeitos na superfície textual e suas implicações no empoderamento dos sujeitos. Além disso, investigo as conexões entre o corpo traumatizado e a mente, compreendendo o corpo como uma superfície histórica que recebe a inscrição da experiência humana (GROSZ, 1994). / The Parsley Massacre – the killing of Haitians living in the Dominican Republic in 1937 – is the theme of The farming of bones (1998), written by Edwidge Danticat, who offers the reader a fictional testimony of a survivor of the violence of genocide. Similarly, in Solar storms (1995), Linda Hogan makes the descendant of a massacred people the protagonist of a search for the past and her people’s history. Both novels employ narrative strategies for a fictional representation of trauma, as personal and collective experiences, implicating the reader in the production of meaning (CARUTH 1996; FREUD; 1920). It is by reliving and re-experiencing the past that traumatized subjects can make sense of their present condition and claim an identity for themselves (HALL, 2006). It is by revising the past, a historically silenced past, that the voices of a community can be heard and their stories brought out to light. In this study, I am also interested in how these stories are constructed, in what are their effects on the surface of the text and their implications in the empowering of subjects. Moreover, I investigate the connections between the traumatized body and the mind, understanding the body as an historical surface for the inscription of human experience (GROSZ, 1994).

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / For women in patriarchal societies, life is stitched with silence and violence. This is especially true for women of color. In a world that has cast women as invisible and voiceless, to create from the margins is to demand to be seen and heard. Thus, women’s art has never had the privilege of being art for art’s sake and instead is necessarily involved in the work of articulating and (re)writing female experience. When women seek, through their work and art, to feel deeply and connect with other women, they tap into what Audre Lorde has famously termed “the power of the erotic.” Lorde suggests that to acknowledge and trust those deepest feelings within our bodies is a subversive power that spurs social change. In the following work, novels by Kate Chopin, Gayl Jones, and Edwidge Danticat are linked by their female characters who seek the erotic via their art of choice and, in doing so, resist disempowerment and explore the life-giving nature of female connection. Furthermore, because the authors themselves are engaged in rendering the female experience visible, the novels discussed actively converse with their respective waves of feminism and propel social activism and feminist discourse. Hence, this project provides both a close reading of The Awakening, Corregidora, and The Dew Breaker, and a broader contention on the role of women’s literature in social justice.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The fragmented bodies and lives of postcolonial Caribbean women examined in Caribbean literature beget struggle and psychological ruin. The characters portrayed in novels by postcolonial Caribbean writers Edwidge Danticat, Michelle Cliff, and Shani Mootoo are marginalized as “Other” by a Western patriarchal discourse that works to silence them because of their gender, color, class, and sexuality. Marginalization participates in the act of fragmentation of these characters because it challenges their sense of identity. Fragmentation means fractured; in terms of these fictive characters, fragmentation results from multiple traumas, each trauma causing another break in their wholeness. Postcolonial scholars have identified the causes and effects of fragmentation on the postcolonial subject, and they argue one’s need to heal because of it. Danticat, Cliff, and Mootoo prove that wholeness is not possible for the postcolonial Caribbean woman, so rather than ruminate on that truth, they examine the journey of the postcolonial Caribbean woman as a way of making meaning of the pieces of her life. This project contends that fragmentation – and the fracture it produces – does not bind these women to negative existences; in fact, the female subjects of Danticat, Cliff, and Mootoo locate power in their fragmentation. The texts studied include Danticat’s "Breath, Eyes, Memory" (1994) and "The Farming of Bones" (1999), Cliff’s "Abeng" (1984) and "No Telephone to Heaven" (1987), and Mootoo’s "Cereus Blooms at Night" (1996) and "He Drown She in the Sea" (2005).

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The increased contact between nations and cultures in the globalization of the twenty-first century requires an increased accountability for the ways in which individuals and countries negotiate these points of contact. New World and Caribbean Studies envision the cross-cultural and transnational encounters between indigenous, European, and African peoples as important contributors to a paradigm within which identity in relation offers an alternative to identities rooted in national and filial frameworks. Such frameworks limit the ability to construct identity without relying upon static representations of history, culture, and ethnicity that tend to privilege one group over another. In the literature of Edwidge Danticat and Julia Alvarez, however, a fictional space is created that rewrites national histories and problematizes rooted identities through their novels' characterization. This fictional space is a transnational paradigm that—in the vocabulary of the critical theories of Édouard Glissant, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, and David A. Hollinger—explores the effects of cultures founded on ideas of relation and affiliation rather than on rooted socio-cultural legitimacy and ethno-political authority. Danticat and Alvarez's characters engage in a process of present living that allows them to negotiate their experience of diaspora and maintain a stable construction of identity in relation.

“Telling Otherwise: Rewriting History, Gender, and Genre in Africa and the African Diaspora” examines counter-discursive postcolonial rewritings. In my first chapter, “Re-Writing the Canon,” I examine two works that rewrite canonical texts from the European tradition, Jean Rhys’s retelling of the life of Jane Eyre’s Bertha in Wide Sargasso Sea and Maryse Condé’s relocation of Wuthering Heights to the Caribbean in La migration des coeurs. In this chapter, I contend that re-writing functions not only as a response, as a “writing back” to the canon, but as a creative appropriation of and critical engagement with the canonical text and its worldview. My second chapter, “Re-Storying the Past,” examines fictional works that rewrite events from the historical past. The works that I study in this chapter are Assia Djebar’s recuperation of Algerian women’s resistance to French colonization in L’amour, la fantasia and Edwidge Danticat’s efforts to reconstruct the 1937 massacre of Haitians under Trujillo in The Farming of Bones. In my third chapter, “Re-Voicing Slavery,” I take for my subject neo-slave narratives that build on and revise the slave narrative genre of the late eighteenth- through early twentieth- centuries. The two works that I examine in this chapter are Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose and the poem sequence Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip, based on the 1781 murder of Africans aboard the slave ship Zong. My fourth chapter, “Re-Membering Gender,” examines texts that foreground the processes of re-writing and re-telling, both thematically and structurally, so as to draw attention to the ways in which discourses and identities are constructed. In their attempts to counter masculinist discourses, these works seek to re-inscribe gender into these discourses, a process of re-membering that engenders a radical deconstruction of fixed notions of identity. The works that I read in this chapter include Daniel Maximin’s L’Isolé soleil, which privileges the feminine and the multiple in opposition to patriarchal notions of single origins and authoritative narrative voices and Maryse Condé’s Traversée de la Mangrove, which rewrites Patrick Chamoiseau’s novel Solibo Magnifique so as to critique the exclusive nature of Caribbean identity in his notion of créolité. / text

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