Abstract not available.

<p> After experiencing the reality of life in the Caribbean for nearly two decades, I remain grieved by the level of suffering throughout the region, yet hopeful that a future of sustainable growth is within the realm of possibility. I am a first hand participant in and observer of the longstanding socioeconomic crisis that has forced the African culture in the Caribbean to repetitively ask the same question: &ldquo;Why is all this hardship happening to us?&rdquo; In order to participate in the solution, this project comprehensively explores the relationship between creative practice and the socioeconomic crisis in the Caribbean&ndash;&ndash;does limited access to environments that facilitate original and conceptual ideas correlate with the socioeconomic crisis in the region? Understanding the relationship and its outcomes could expose the source of long-term hardship and identify a path of sustainable growth for the African culture in the Caribbean. Accomplishing this objective required an analysis of four distinct perspectives: my observations as a participant in the culture, the historical progression of the region, recognized research that speaks directly to socioeconomic crisis and creative practice, and the voice of the culture. Reaching for clarity and rationale in answering the primary research question of this project&ndash;&ndash;<i>What is the relationship between creative practice and socioeconomic crisis in the Caribbean? </i>&ndash;&ndash;the highest priority of understanding and respect has been given to the voice of the Africans in the Caribbean. Therefore, the Afro-Caribs on St. John, United States Virgin Islands serve as the narrative to reflect the reality of life in a contemporary context for the culture. The outcomes and methods of analysis developed in this project should be a useful tool for other cultures seeking to alleviate socioeconomic crisis and implement a sustainable pathway of growth.</p><p> Keywords: <i>Caribbean, creative practice, creativity, socioeconomic crisis, development, decolonization, dependency, living systems, oppression, cultural conditioning, chaos, Africans, West Indians.</i></p>

This dissertation presents a study of carnavalesque parody in three works by Virgilio Pinera. The first chapter consists of a study of the genesis of the master narratives of literary modernity in Latin America as formulated in the writings of Jose Marti and elaborated by the arielista writers in the first decades of the century. The chapter also includes a study of the literary group Origenes to which Virgilio Pinera belonged and a brief biographical essay about the author. The second chapter begins with a study of the theory of parody based on the theoretical writings of Linda Hutcheon. This study is followed by an analysis of the short story "El album" as a parody of the cuban neobarroque, an aesthetic shared by some of the members of Origenes. The chapter concludes with a study of the novel La carne de Rene as a padody of the Buildungsroman and of the master narratives of Latin American literaty modernity. The third chapter begins with a study of the popular tradition in Cuban theatre which was influential in the development of Virgilio Pinera's theories about theatre. This study is followed by a comparative study of Tembladera, a play by Juan Antonio Ramos which is based on the arielista modern ideology, and Electra Garrigo, Pinera's first play. The final chapter includes the conclusions of this dissertation.

Esta disertacion estudia dos novelas de Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda y dos de Reinaldo Arenas: Guatimozin, ultimo emperador de Mexico (1846) y El cacique de Turmeque (1860), y El mundo alucinante (1969) y La Loma del Angel (1987). En tanto novelas historicas que son tambien re-escritura, este estudio examina junto con ellas sus hipotextos y metatextos: la Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva Espana (Bernal Diaz), las Cartas de relacion (Cortes) y El carnero (Freile); las Memorias de S.Teresa de Mier, Cecilia Valdes (Villaverde), El siglo de las luces (Carpentier) y Biografia de un cimarron (Barnet). La lectura de estos textos se realize siguiendo principalmente los postulados teoricos de Benedict Anderson, Foucault, Genette, Hutcheon y Hayden White. Las novelas de Avellaneda y Arenas son analizadas dentro de sus respectivos contextos de fundacion nacional: la poetica romantica cubana de mediados del siglo XIX y la poetica de la Revolucion (1959). A Avellaneda y Arenas los une el hecho de ser dos escritores cubanos excluidos del grupo fundacional: Avellaneda como mujer que se niega a cumplir la funcion asignada a su sexo, y Arenas como cuidadano cuyas necesidades y deseos--los del homosexual, entre otros--no coinciden con los del ente abstracto de "el Pueblo". Sin embargo tambien ellos escriben novelas historicas: sus textos hacen parte del discurso sobre la nacion, si bien cuestionando sus supuestos de manera radical y haciendo patentes sus contradicciones. En buena medida para estos autores la realidad son textos: textos que son tema de su excritura y escritura que deviene por tanto re-escritura. La historia que escriben no es la nunca antes contada, sino la historia de como ese relato ha sido escrito; y es tambien la historia que quiere volver a contar el acontecimiento porque no comparte el relato que de el se ha hecho. Las novelas historicas de Avellaneda y Arenas son asi relatos escritos en contra de la historiografia patriarcal y evolutiva que homogeniza la realidad a costa de sus particularidades, y trivializa sus proyectos.

In this dissertation, I explore the connections between three post-colonial epics: James Joyce's Ulysses, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, and Derek Walcott's Omeros. Each work focuses on the disruption and loss that has occurred respectively in Ireland, India, and the Caribbean because of each country's encounter with the colonizing force of England. Out of this experience are born narrators who must contend with the fact of a hybridized and contentious inheritance as they struggle to articulate their experiences as members of nations gaining their political freedom. Using a blend of both European and indigenous theorists, I argue that by actively cultivating a stance of hybridity, these works use what Homi Bhabha has termed “border terrain” to locate new nations, along the lines of Benedict Anderson's “imagined communities,” that attempt to evade the prescriptiveness of both colonialism and emergent nationalism. Rather than continuing the Manichean Dichotomy used by English colonizers to subdue and divide indigenous populations, Joyce, Rushdie, and Walcott offer narratives that encompass elements from both colonial and indigenous inheritances in a volatile mixture. Having inherited a fractured and contentious world of narrative exclusion, the characters of Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, Saleem Sinai, Achille, and Major Plunkett actively transgress the boundaries between narratives, looking for dialogue and connection. Ultimately, the endings of the three texts provide clues toward a future where Edward Said's notion of reading and hearing “contrapuntally” will reflect both the multiplicity and the contentiousness of the post-colonial inheritance.

The dissertation examines the nomadism of contemporary migrant writers who deliberately resist location and deterritorialize the dérive and déracinement of the nomad. Through nomadism, these writers elude the fixed identity categories—le nègre, le migrant, l'autre—often imposed on them by the country of adoption. These three writers—Edwidge Danticat, Dany Laferrière, and Linda Lê—each write out the diasporic and exilic dislocations of nomadism: linguistic, geopolitical and schizo-social. The hybrid methodology informing this study includes postcolonial, poststructuralist and feminist theories. The first four chapters establish the theoretical parameters for reading nomadic literatures, and the final chapter offers nomadic readings of contemporary Haitian and Vietnamese migrant literatures in France, Quebec, and the United States. These subtitles are problematic; yet, I theoretically problematize these terms and the national boundaries (geopolitical, psychological, and schizo-social) that they signify. Thus, the terms—Vietnamese and Haitian, specifically as situated in France, Québec and the United States of America—are read less as discrete geographical or national domains, and more as a transmuting (if also transnationalist) impulse, a setting of the two states into creative tension. I examine the multi-cultural and plurilingual ‘border crossings’ which occur in nomadic migrant writers, such as Lê, who writes out the linguistic and identitary vicissitudes of migration. Similarly, I explore how two francophone Haitian writers—an émigré in Québec (Laferrière) and the other a refugee/immigrant in the United States (Danticat)—take flight in different languages: the first in a minor usage of French, the latter in a minor usage of English. My analysis of these writers emphasizes several core themes: espaces exilaires; the deterritorialization of fixed identitary categories (whether around issues of gender, nationality, sexuality, or race); the destabilization of language, both the mother-tongue and the colonial (‘colonizing’) language; and the literary and cultural nomadism of migrant writers who ultimately resist immigration. Each migrant writer nomadically deterritorializes the spaces and tropes of migratory writing—territories of old, new, natal, adopted, native, acquired, immigrant, migrant and citizen. Through my readings, I show that even in texts by migrant writers, who move from one place to another, a sort of nomadism persists.

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.

Puerto Rico has endured horrendous natural disasters in the last few years, leaving thousands to cope with the aftermath; a mental health crisis. Therefore, understanding how Puerto Ricans navigate adversities, be that childhood adversity, natural disasters or daily stress is of utmost importance. Understanding the role resilience and drinking play in Puerto Rico will help us to further understand how they navigate adversities. Hence the reason why in this study we looked at how Adverse Childhood Experiences, Perceived Stress, Natural Disaster Adversity and Shame relate to each other and to Drinking behaviors and Resiliency. Data were collected on Puerto Rico via an online survey. Several individuals participated in the study (N = 189). Modifying variables included, age, place of residence on the island, gender, ethnicity, education, occupation and socio economic status. The results demonstrated significant differences between some modifying variables. Differences were seen between men and women in levels of Shame and ACES. No significant differences were found between ethnicities in levels of Shame, Stress, ACES, Hurricane Adversities and Resiliency. Similarly, no relationship was found between respondents level of drinking and SES. When looking at the sample as a whole there was no relationship between ACES and hurricane adversities as well as with drinking. However, there appears to be a positive relationship between ACES and Shame, and a small positive relationship between drinking and Shame. On the other hand, a negative relationship was found between Shame, ACES and Resiliency. However, a small positive relationship was found between the number of drinks people have and Resiliency. Additional analysis was conducted to further understand these variables and their relationships. Additional research, exploratory research, is needed to understand the variables and the relationship between them. Exploratory research is needed as a way to further understand the role culture plays in understanding Shame, ACES, Stress, Hurricane Adversities, Drinking and Resiliency in Puerto Rico.

“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. ^