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“A Howling in the Paperwork” explores the relationship between ethnography, archival practice, and experimentalism in the work of twentieth century women artists whose syncretic ambitions lead them on a geographical itinerary to and through the greater Caribbean. This dissertation proposes a special synergy between artists with “scattered” bodies of work, in perpetual search of the right form for their creative energy, and the space of the Caribbean with its history of genocides, migrations, and displacements. I focus on women artists, in particular, to foreground the relationship between social precarity and aesthetic innovation. The flight from one technique to another has a push as well as a pull, as women artists have been excluded or expelled from institutional homes for their work, including the university. In the absence of reliable support, the artists I consider come to rely on and refine rigorously subjective methods that prefigure the necessary crisis of objectivity, especially in the social sciences, that would enter mainstream discourse decades later. But even as the artists I consider foreground their own bodies, lives, and communities in their work, they engage diasporic theories of spirit possession, inheritance, and collective creativity that amount to implicit—and sometimes explicit—critiques of the artist as self-contained auteur. Whether or not “there is something strongly feminine” in Caribbean culture, as Antonio Benítez Rojo suggests in The Repeating Island, the idea that there is places women in particularly charged relation to their own creative production in a Caribbean context. My project pays particular attention to the ways these artists attend to one another, taking up the detritus of those who came before as the raw material for new projects. For example, the Cuban-American émigré Ana Mendieta turns to the amateur anthropology of Lydia Cabrera as inspiration for the stone sculptures she carves in the caves of Jaruco, north of Havana, on a return trip to her home island. This relational consciousness does not establish a linear narrative of descent so much as it imagines a transhistorical collaboration in which I, too, participate. Alongside traditional methodologies of close-reading and archival research, I engage their work in more personal ways: I’ve traveled to the caves of Jaruco to visit the almost-ruined remains of Mendieta’s sculptures, I’ve translated Marigloria Palma’s poetry into English, and I’ve interviewed Julie Dash for a literary magazine. Much of the meaning of their work resides in its unmistakable invitation to collaborate in its development and dissemination: the second half of this dissertation considers my own inheritance of feminist practice in the context of Puerto Rican culture.

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This written thesis is a companion to a 30-minute documentary video of the same title. The documentary is a presentation of the historical conflict between the United States Navy and the people of the island of Vieques, Puerto Rico. For over 60 years the island was used by the United States Navy as a military training facility. The documentary attempts to present an analysis of the struggle between citizens of the island and the Navy. This written component presents a summarized history of Puerto Rico, Vieques and the conflict with the United States Navy. In addition, the preproduction, production and post-production process of the documentary are discussed. A theoretical analysis of the filmmaker's approach and technique are addressed and analyzed as well. The thesis's goal is to provide a clear understanding of the Vieques conflict to United States audiences who do not a familiarity with the topic. The thesis is presented from the perspective of a person who grew up in Puerto Rico.

The silence and invisibility of Puerto Rican soldiers in fictional and non-fictional representations of U.S. Wars has motivated me to look for alternative spaces in which these unaccounted voices and images are currently being produced, stored, circulated, and memorialized. Within this framework, my dissertation explores the self-representation of Puerto Rican servicemen and women in social networking sites (SNS), (i.e. as MySpace and Facebook), in user-generated content (UGC) platforms, (i.e. YouTube), and also in web memorials. I am interested in understanding how Puerto Rican soldiers self-represent their ethnonational identity online within the overlapping of second-class citizenship. The theoretical framework proposed for this research will apply theories such as 1) articulation; 2) the notion of contact zone; and 3) colonial/racial subjectivities. To complete this goal, my research method draws on online ethnography, textual, and critical discourse analysis. Firstly, I will discuss the limited repertoire of images of Puerto Rican soldiers in TV and film. My argument is that, besides the massive omission of this history, the images and motifs that do escape de facto social censorship will be in conversation with the self-representations. The second chapter is the result of four years of the process of online ethnography on which I analyze the instances of self-representation of Puerto Rican soldiers in SNS. My interest was seeing how those spaces were inflected by an ethnonational subjectivity. The third chapter explores the ways Puerto Rican soldiers, embedded in mash-up cultures, uses UGCs platforms to upload videos that transform the soldiers from passive consumers of images to active producers of content, which tend to disrupt dominant narratives of power. The last chapter explores the emergence of web memorials dedicated to the Puerto Rican soldiers. My main argument is that these instances of self- representation in online spaces are in conversation with the moments of silences and misrepresentations of Puerto Rican soldiers in traditional media, but also have become acts of enunciation in which the particular Puerto Ricanness of the Puerto Rican soldier is affirmed within complex, layered histories of imperialism, racism, heterosexism, and second-class citizenship. / text

This dissertation examines the bildungsroman genre in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. A close examination of the development of this genre demonstrates that it has ideological implications that link the young protagonists’ development with that of the nation. The authors on whom I focus—Ángela Hernández, Rita Indiana Hernández, René Marqués, Pedro Juan Soto, Magali García Ramis, Severo Sarduy, and Jesús Díaz—do not merely imitate the European model but revise, adapt, and often subvert it thematically and, in some cases, aesthetically. I argue that these bildungsromane differ, for the most part, from the European prototype due to their openly political themes, such as the establishment of the Estado Libre Asociado in Puerto Rico, the 1959 Revolution in Cuba, and, in the case of the Dominican Republic, Trujillo’s dictatorship. I claim that Dominican bildungsromane do not propose national projects or models but rather question the purported homogeneity of identity of the country as a normalized political body. On the other hand, in Cuba and Puerto Rico the genre has been used to promote absolute discourses of nationality as well as political projects that must be questioned due to their discriminatory and sometimes racist and violent nature.

This dissertation examines the bildungsroman genre in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. A close examination of the development of this genre demonstrates that it has ideological implications that link the young protagonists’ development with that of the nation. The authors on whom I focus—Ángela Hernández, Rita Indiana Hernández, René Marqués, Pedro Juan Soto, Magali García Ramis, Severo Sarduy, and Jesús Díaz—do not merely imitate the European model but revise, adapt, and often subvert it thematically and, in some cases, aesthetically. I argue that these bildungsromane differ, for the most part, from the European prototype due to their openly political themes, such as the establishment of the Estado Libre Asociado in Puerto Rico, the 1959 Revolution in Cuba, and, in the case of the Dominican Republic, Trujillo’s dictatorship. I claim that Dominican bildungsromane do not propose national projects or models but rather question the purported homogeneity of identity of the country as a normalized political body. On the other hand, in Cuba and Puerto Rico the genre has been used to promote absolute discourses of nationality as well as political projects that must be questioned due to their discriminatory and sometimes racist and violent nature.

No description available.

No description available.