viii, 91 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / Caribbean cultural ideas and values placed on death and mourning, especially in relation to cultural roles women are expected to perform, are primary motivating factors in the development of female self and identity in Caribbean women's literature. Based on analysis of three texts, QPH, Annie John, and Beyond the Limbo Silence, I argue that notions of death and funerary rituals are employed within Caribbean women's literature to (re)connect protagonist females to their homeland and secure a sense of identity. In addition, while some texts highlight the necessity of prescribing to the socially constructed roles of women within the ritual context and rely on the uproper" adherence to the traditional process to maintain the status quo, other texts show that the inversion or subversion of these traditions is also an important aspect of funerary rituals and notions of death that permeate contemporary Caribbean culture. / Committee in Charge: Dr. Dianne Dugaw, Folklore; Dr. Lisa Gilman, English; Dr. Phil Scher, Anthropology

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2008. / Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 181-190).

Since Alejo Carpentier's 1944 encounter with the "real maravilloso" in the ruins of the Citadelle La Ferriáere, Haiti has been linked with the notion of Latin American identity, in particular, and American identity, in general. Interesting to me are the ways and the means by which Haiti resurfaces in Cuban and Puerto Rican narratives and what allusions to Haiti in these texts imply about its relationship to the Hispanic Caribbean. I will combine the ideas of John Beverley, Sybille Fischer, and Mimi Sheller to discuss how representations of Haiti work to perpetuate its disavowal and render it a consumable product for the rest of the Caribbean as a whole, and for the Hispanic Caribbean specifically. I will focus on works by Cuban and Puerto Rican authors who have prepared, processed, and packaged Haiti in such a way that its culture, language, and even sexuality are able to satisfy long-held cravings for that which is local and exotic. Thus, I hope to explain how it has been and will continue to be possible for the Hispanic Caribbean to consume Haiti positively as a symbol of its marvelous reality and negatively as an Afro-Caribbean personification of racial, cultural, and political decadence in literature. / by Walteria C. Tucker. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2011. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2011. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

The thesis aims to analyse Sam Selvon's fiction between 1950 and 1990 in relation to the colonial subjects' identity crisis. The thesis will argue that Selvon's fiction is independent of traditional and canonical categories because his representation of colonial subjects is entirely innovative and unprecedented. I will analyse Selvon's novels A Brighter Sun (1952), An Island is a World (1955), The Lonely Londoners (1956), The Housing Lark (1965), Moses Ascending (1975), and Moses Migrating (1983). Each novel sheds light on a different facet of the colonial subject. Nevertheless, colonisation, migration, and identity crisis are common themes for the novels chosen. From A Brighter Sun to Moses Migrating, Selvon destroys the caricatured image of the colonised subject. He reaches authenticity on the level of character depiction and through the vernacular, ballad-like narrative. Additionally, the novels represent different aspects of colonisation and migration: "back at home", "the motherland", and "back and forth". I will display how every aspect is fluid and undefinable. A Brighter Sun takes place in the West Indies. An Island is a World displays "back and forth" experience in the West Indies, USA, and Britain. The Lonely Londoners, The Housing Lark, and Moses Ascending take place in "the motherland"....

xi, 236 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / Writers in the Caribbean, like writers throughout the postcolonial world, return to colonial texts to rewrite the myths that justified and maintained colonial control. Exemplary of a widespread, regional phenomenon that begins at mid-century, writers such as Aimé Césaire and George Lamming take up certain texts such as Shakespeare's The Tempest and recast them in their own image. Postcolonial literary theory reads this act of rewriting the canon as a political one that speaks back to power and often advocates for political and cultural independence. Towards the end of the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Caribbean women writers begin a new wave of rewriting that continues in this tradition, but with certain differences, not least of which is a focused attention to gender and sexuality and to the literary legacies of romance. In the dissertation I consider a number of novels from throughout the region that rewrite the romance, including Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Maryse Condé's La migration des coeurs (1995), Mayra Santos-Febres's Nuestra señora de la noche (2006), and Dionne Brand's In Another Place, Not Here (1996). Romance, perhaps more than any other literary form, exerts an allegorical force that exceeds the story of individual characters. The symbolic weight of romance imagines the possibilities of a social order--a social order dependent on the sexual behavior of its citizens. By rewriting the romance, Caribbean women reconsider the sexual politics that have linked women with metaphorical constructions of the nation while at the same time detailing the extent to which transnational forces, including colonization, impact the representation of love and desire in literary texts. Although ultimately these novels refuse the generic requirements of the traditional resolution for romance (the so-called happy ending), they nonetheless gesture towards a reordering of community and a revised notion of kinship that recognizes the weight of both gendered and sexual identities in the Caribbean. / Committee in charge: Karen McPherson, Chairperson, Romance Languages; David Vazquez, Member, English; Tania Triana, Member, Romance Languages; Judith Raiskin, Outside Member, Womens and Gender Studies