This dissertation studies the newspaper articles written by Nemesio R. Canales (1878-1923), who published his work between 1908 and 1923. His literary oeuvre comprises different genres: novels, essays and poetry. Although Puerto Rican literary history establishes Canales within the Modernist movement, this study intends to demonstrate that even though his work shows ideological aspects which relate him to the Modernist's world-view and, moreover, to those that configured the Puerto Rican Modernist period, his discourse anticipates the avant-garde movement The first chapter focuses on the Puerto Rican Modernist movement which ran parallel to the most important event in Puerto Rican reality: the U.S. invasion of 1898. The Puerto Rican writers of the turn of the century brought to literature their preoccupation with the historical and political development of Puerto Rico. The 1898 invasion meant the loss of political hegemony and the imposition of a foreign language: English. Furthermore, it made this generation realize the necessity of configuring a national identity which gave the movement its nationalistic tinge. As a result, the movement was removed from the preciosity and escapism which characterized the Modernist movements of Spanish America The second chapter summarizes the most relevant criticism on Canales' work. We also analyze more carefully and/or reject some of these critics' opinions The last three chapters study in detail the characteristics of Canales' Modernist ideology as well as the options that Modernism itself offered. But these traits show an avant-garde sensibility. We study the discursive strategies that transform the popular and the daily into literary phenomena by the use of such techniques as simile, metaphor and anecdotes of popular tradition, as well as colloquial lexicon. These strategies reflect a profound questioning of the traditional social interpretations that are particular to certain social classes Through his articles, Canales projects himself as a writer that transformed the popular to the realm of literary ideas. Moreover, Canales is the forerunner of the Puerto Rican contemporary writers who have given literary status to the street talk, the language of the folk / acase@tulane.edu

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Virgilio Pinera is one of the most important Cuban writers. Although he is the author of a large collection of poems, short stories, novels, plays, and essays, his works are barely known in Latin America During the 1940's, when the Caribbean writers such as Alejo Carpentier, Jose Lezama Lima, and Luis Pales Matos were elaborating the aesthetics of magic realism, the neo-baroque and negritude, Pinera's tendency was opposite to that of the aforementioned writers Some of Pinera's books have as titles Cuentos frios (Cold Stories), Aire frio (Cold Air), and Helada zona (Frozen Zone). For Pinera coldness, as a poetic principle that governs not only his narrative but also his poetry and plays, consists of the 'exposition of the pure facts'. This 'exposition of the pure facts' reveals Pinera's obsessive concern on style Coldness, in Pinera's writing, is a privileged image about the society and the epoch where he lives. At times, coldness refers to masochism. Coldness and cruelty function as the denial of sensuality, as a condition for masochistic pleasure. Coldness is also an image about culture and its discontents in postmodern society / acase@tulane.edu

Folklore and popular culture can be applied to the study and interpretation of literature, specifically, in the case of this project, to the works of contemporary Latin American women authors. The women in this study are representative of authors who incorporate folkloric elements into their works and, as a result, create works that contribute to contemporary popular culture. In their hands, folkloric elements such as traditions, proverbs, rules of behavior, folk tales, fairy tales, and others, find their way into popular and best-selling works of literature. The folklore they incorporate is subverted, shown from a feminine perspective, challenging the stereotypes and roles that have been assigned to them by a patriarchal system. The authors used in this study include Rosario Castellanos, Brianda Domecq, Laura Esquivel, Rosario Ferre, Elena Garro, Angelica Gorodischer, Luisa Valenzuela, and Ana Lydia Vega Many folklorists believe there is an inevitable presence of folklore in literature. It is, therefore, surprising that there have not been more studies which combine literature, folklore and popular culture. This study attempts to fill that void, using folklore as the basis for interpreting short stories, essays and novels by Latin American women Because some genres of folklore have traditionally been associated with women, both as narrators and protagonists, it is necessary to study a broad representation of the genres, rather than concentrate solely on one and in so doing reinforce stereotypes that need to be re-examined. My study demonstrates how women are using a variety of folklore to challenge and redefine their place in today's society. Rather than sharing a common theme, the works I have selected are united by the author's approach to her work. Each author returns to traditional folkloric elements as the basis for her story or novel, elements that have defined men and women's roles and behavior for centuries, and recycles them, showing a new perspective and an alternate way to think and/or act, and create a work a work that can be considered a part of popular culture / acase@tulane.edu

This dissertation will trace the representation of marginal feminine subjects in literary narratives produced in Puerto Rico in the nineties to see whether the peripheral position provides a space in which the feminine Puerto Rican subject can de-center and de-stabilize the dominant discourses of the West The discourse of miscegenation is embedded in the national fabric of the countries of the Hispanic Caribbean. As a result, the mulatta woman has traditionally represented the embodiment of the Spanish and African races in the narratives of national identity. In the first chapter, I propose to study the novels written by Mayra Santos-Febres and Mayra Montero to analyze the presence of the contemporary black woman and offer a vision of her struggles and desires, as well as to trace the relationship which exists between the woman of color and national identity. Furthermore, I will attempt to determine whether her racial identity reveals an emerging state of liberation or a continuing state of cultural dependency. This first chapter will include the theoretical framework provided by the works of Marco Moreno Fraginals, Antonio Benitez Rojo, and Vera Kutzinsky In the second chapter, I will study the transvestite subject in the works of Mayra Santos Febres in order to see how this presence parodies and disrupts the concepts of gender and national identity. Furthermore, the study will stress how the theatrical performance of the transvestite, accompanied with its elements of disguise, music and acting, can serve as a postcolonial satire which points to a Caribbean that masks itself so as to denounce the voyeuristic and fetishistic behavior of a colonizing First World. In this chapter, I will use the theories of performance and gender elaborated by Judith Butler, Marjorie Garber, and Chilean feminist critic, Nelly Richards In the third chapter, the investigation will focus on the feminine subjects that transgress heterosexual codes in order to show how their identities express erotic discourse as an element of resistance against the processes of objectification and heterosexual oppression. These subjects oppose compulsory heterosexuality and gender constructions in order to liberate their true selves and desires. This analysis will take into account the theories of feminist and gender critics such as Monica Wittig, Adrienne Rich, Luce Irigaray and Nelly Richards The literary narratives cited above offer discourses that oppose hegemony in an effort to counterbalance the distribution of power. These texts, which seek to challenge authoritative power, also aim to give marginal feminine subjects a space from which they can generate alternative interpretative modes and in turn speak out and become an agent of her own history. The dissertation will conclude that feminine subjects that are positioned in the peripheries move about in a series of resisting movements---translocations, transvestisms, masqueradings---which protect the Caribbean feminine subject from being totally exposed and decoded, and these acts of resistance serve as a buffer to help prevent continuing acts of appropriation and colonization on the part of dominant Western powers. (Abstract shortened by UMI.) / acase@tulane.edu

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, the interpretive framework for cultural analysis in Cuba has shifted in fundamental ways. On the material level, the cultural institutions of the Cuban Revolution---the UNEAC, the ICAIC, or Casa de las Americas, for example---no longer fund the arts as they had for the first thirty years of socialist government. Cuban writers, filmmakers and musicians living on the island have thus come to depend, to a large extent, on the same foreign markets, and companies as their contemporaries in exile, blurring like never before the already confining categories of 'revolutionary' and 'counterrevolutionary.' Although the new market realities, together with the perceived failure of the socialist economic model throughout the world, constitute a crisis for the official narrative of the Cuban Revolution, the three texts that are the focus of this study rewrite not only the triumphant socialist narrative but the hegemonic narrative of exile as well. 'El lobo, el bosque y el hombre nuevo' by Senel Paz (1991), Las palabras perdidas by Jesus Diaz (1992) and Informe contra mi mismo by Eliseo Alberto (1997) do not participate in a common social movement or belong to a common literary school; all three, nonetheless, deconstruct the nostalgia-driven narrative of a paradise lost that has characterized much exile literature as well as the Utopian narrative of socialist revolution and redemption. The authors themselves, moreover, resist categorization as either old-guard exiles or militant revolutionaries---a fact that may not justify positivist or deterministic conclusions about the nature of their work but that does, nonetheless, structure the cultural significance or reception of that work. We are confronted, then, with works that occupy more ambiguous cultural and ideological spaces than revolution and exile had generated heretofore, and that cultivate, at the textual level, an ideological and cultural middle ground. The challenge these texts pose to the contending hegemonic narratives of revolution and exile, then, comes not in the form of an alternative and definitive counternarrative, but rather in the form of self-consciously partial and multiperspectival narrative modes that undermine the very premise of narrative authority or objectivity / acase@tulane.edu

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"Paradoxes of Particularity: Caribbean Literary Imaginaries," explores Caribbean literary responses to nationalism by focusing on Anglophone and Francophone post-war Caribbean novels as well as a selection of short fiction published in the 1930s and `40s. Because many Caribbean nations gained their independence relatively recently (Jamaica and Trinidad in the 1960s, the Bahamas, Grenada, Dominica, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent in the `70s, Antigua and St. Kitts in the `80s) and because some remain colonial possessions (Aruba, Martinique, Guadeloupe, etc.), nationalism and its alternatives are of major literary concern to Caribbean authors. This project considers how and to what extent the writings of such authors as Edouard Glissant, Maryse Condé, and Robert Antoni counter nationalist tendencies with Pan-Caribbean alternatives, arguing that the Caribbean texts under examination propose that we view the Caribbean as a unified region despite substantial differences (racial, linguistic, colonial, etc.) that otherwise tend to encourage separate, nationalist sentiments. Moreover, these Caribbean texts paradoxically emphasize discrete identities based on racial pasts and language communities, even as they forward a Pan-Caribbean ideology: uniqueness is, for many Caribbean writers, the fundamental basis for a unified sense of "Caribbeanness." This project dubs the phenomenon the "paradox of particularity," and identifies it as a postcolonial rhetorical strategy in twentieth-century Caribbean fiction. After an historical introduction, Chapter One examines the increasingly Pan-Caribbean content of Barbadian literary journal Bim, Martinican ex-patriate journal La Revue du Monde Noir, and BBC radio program Caribbean Voices. Each of these media sources encouraged contributors to focus on topics that were of central and unique concern to his/her island community. However, these concerns often overlapped: authors from multiple islands submitted fiction and essays touching on labor struggles, the plight of the poor, wartime anxieties, and racial inequalities. Thus, in printing that which was nominally unique and particular to individual islands, these widely digested media sources in fact highlighted similarities throughout the archipelago, setting the stage for bolder expressions of a particularity-based regionalism. Chapter Two focuses on the Pan-Caribbean antillanité of Edouard Glissant. In Glissant's fiction, the only character capable of both recovering this past and of uniting the Caribbean is the defiantly isolated maroon (and, occasionally, his male descendants). Set against the backdrop of Martinique's fight to become a semi-autonomous département of France and the emergence of Jamaica and Trinidad as independent national entities, Glissant's novel La Lézarde (1958) at once celebrates postcolonial zeal for independence, and emphasizes that national autonomy is the first step in a process of regional unification. Chapter Three looks at gendered and cultural counterpoints to Glissant's notion of "marooning," through novels that reimagine the history of New World slavery and the Caribbean Black Power Movement. The chapter focuses on Simone Schwarz-Bart's Pluie et Vent Sur Telumée Miracle (1972), in which an ostracized sorceress attempts to unite her fragmented community, Maryse Condé's Moi, Tituba, Sorcèriere Noire de Salem (1988), which imagines a Glissantian link between Barbados, other Caribbean islands, and North America through the benevolent workings of a black female maroon, André and Schwarz-Bart's La Mulâtresse Solitude (1972), which both recuperates an historical maroon figure (as, indeed does Condé) and imaginatively reconstructs the African past which informs her New World rebellion, and Michelle Cliff's Abeng (1984), which features a psychologically marooned heroine who imagines not only a unified Caribbean, but also a Caribbean that serves as the racially inclusive bridge between diasporic communities in North and South America. Ultimately, in identifying female maroons as the unifying agents of cultural transmission, Schwarz-Bart, Condé, and Cliff's experimental fiction not only proposes a feminist, regional alternative to patriarchal nationalism, but imaginatively links colonized Caribbean citizens to broader, nation-less communities of suffering. Chapter Four focuses even more explicitly on formal and linguistic experimentation by examining Trinidadian Robert Antoni's Divina Trace (1991), and Martinican Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco (1992) in relation to literary postmodernism. Rather than casting a wise maroon as the oracular voice of wisdom, both novels deluge us with a heteroglossic babble of voices, paradoxically suggesting that the potential for Caribbean interconnectedness lies in the collision of multiple, idiosyncratic uses of language. Moreover, by testing the boundaries of the novel form, these texts gesture toward the possibility of formally innovative alternatives to the nation-state. Thus, this project both identifies the "paradox of particularity" (in which difference is the defining component of group identity) as a postcolonial tactic in twentieth-century Caribbean fiction and demonstrates the intense political engagement of experimental modernist and postmodern Caribbean fiction. By strategically keeping individuality and collectivity in tension with one another, these writers offer a model for postcolonial independence that both preserves autonomy and avoids mimicking the colonial Western nation-state.

Presently, my practice is multi-disciplinary and includes ceramics, sculpture, metals, design, and social practice — the work explores cultural identity, immigration, and cultural imagery using found objects and vernacular architectural references. Many of which are rooted in a post-colonial Anglo Caribbean history, but have grown to include new environments, narratives, and histories that parallel the latter.

Because it has no distinct formal characteristics, the Bildungsroman genre is defined only through the reader's recognition of the protagonist's transformation from an inchoate identity to a fixed, mature one. This recognition depends on how the protagonist's development conforms to a model of maturation derived from Enlightenment ideals of the individual as autonomous and rational. By responding to the contested nature of identity in American culture, this re-generation of the Enlightenment paradigm as a natural expression of the self is the foundation for the Bildungsroman's popularity. When applied to ethnic American texts that critique the structures of racism and patriarchy, the genre destabilizes those critiques by reinforcing the Enlightenment paradigm from which those structures are derived The use of autobiographical ethnic Bildungsromane as representative texts often relies on reductive assumptions about the concept of truth, but key texts such as Black Boy, by Richard Wright, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X demonstrate the mediated nature of truth in autobiography, and the reception of their texts reveals the problems associated with the assumption of the transparent truth of the texts. Jamaica Kincaid also undermines the transparent relationship between truth and autobiography, as well as the independent self of the Bildungsroman, by presenting her development as a writer through accounts of her father and brother The role of ethnic Bildungsromane as representative texts inspires anxiety about the concept of authenticity. The texts of second generation immigrant writers Richard Rodriguez, Maxine Hong Kingston and Paule Marshall are recognized by readers as Bildungsromane, but that recognition, through the writers' struggle with cultural authenticity, celebrates a fluid conception of identity while simultaneously authorizing an overly personal interpretation of the protagonists' struggle to define their cultural identity The Bildungsroman implicitly posits a fixed cultural identity in its definition of the self, but cultural identity is fundamentally dynamic, formulated, in part, in a dialogic relationship with historical narratives. The adaptation of two prominent African American novels to films, The Color Purple and Beloved, by emphasizing the Bildungsroman element of personal development, sacrifice the richer historical, cultural identities of the novels / acase@tulane.edu