This study attempts to organize the conglomerate of writing on Africans within Republican Cuba. Starting with an examination of the scientific stages of such writing, we will trace the assorted work of Fernando Ortiz (1881-1969), whose anthropological study of Afrocuba produced myriad readings of the heritage. The multiplicity of renderings of Cuba s Africans from the scientific arena including condemning, racially charged treatises and spiritual conceptualizations of the richness of Cuba s African heritage generated an air of inconstancy. Indeed, the contradictions generated by the discipline s scientific course were incredibly polarized, representative of an ambiguity that became emblematic of Afrocuban Studies. Regardless of such blatant ideological opposition, tracing Ortiz s anthropological reading of the place of Cuba s Africans among the nation provides a telling insight into the racialized circumstances surrounding Republican nation-building. Whether scientific research scorned Cuba s Africans or applauded their inclusion in the national imaginary, Ortiz s writing and his invitations to Cuba s younger scholars to partake of folk study outlines a succinct treatment of Cuban nation-building between 1902 and 1959. If scientific research on Afrocuba promulgated studies that both cherished and demonized Cuba s Africanness, so too did Afrocuba s artistic invocations bear contradiction. After the vogue of the African swept the 1920s Parisian art scene, Africanized artistic currents infiltrated Cuba and mingled with its scientific counterpart. The ensuing readings of Afrocuba, contradictory and complex, spurred both research-art overlaps and the rejection of scientific tenets for a so-called artistically authentic rendering of Afrocuba that is, a reading from the inside, from within Afrocuba. It is along these lines that fiction writers (including Alejo Carpentier, Lydia Cabrera, and Rmulo Lachataer) posted renderings of Afrocuba that partook of various degrees of science, research, and artistic vogue. The resultant narrative system portrayed three different sorts of Afrocuban literature; none of the writers aligned succinctly in their portrayal. Afrocuba s poetic front was even more varied in its evocation of the nation, the academy, and popular art. In this way, Nicols Guilln, Ramn Guirao, Juan Marinello, and Emilio Ballagas encapsulated unique poetic visions on two fronts: through offerings to Afrocuban poetics and through essays on the Afrocuban poetic mode. We shall examine such pieces in the hopes of understanding the balanced interplay that academic research and artistic invocation absorbed in the nation-building process, in the fashioning of Afrocuba.

This research aims to understand self-translation as a postcolonial, social, political, cultural and linguistic phenomenon and it focuses on how it communicates a hybrid transcultural identity that not only challenges the monolingual literary canons and concepts of national homogeneous identities, but also subverts to patriarchal society. Thus, I understand self-translation as a mean of empowerment and contestation. The cases under study are Puerto Rican writers Rosario Ferré and Esmeralda Santiago, and their novels The House on the Lagoon and América’s Dream, written in English and translated into Spanish by the authors themselves. I believe that Rosario Ferré and Esmeralda Santiago are representative of a group of writers, artists and intellectuals who through their work originated from the island and from the U.S. Diaspora, have aimed to give voice to a Puerto Rican postcolonial hybrid identity that has been silenced until recently. Therefore, they disrupt the official national cultural and linguistic discourse about the Puerto Rican identity that has been weaved by the Spanish language in opposition to U.S. colonialist attempts of linguistic and cultural assimilation. This dissertation is located in the intersection between the fields of comparative literature, translation, cultural, gender and postcolonial studies. The question that guides this research is: Is self-translation in the case of Puerto Rico, a result of cultural hybridity in Puerto Rico’s postcolonial context?Therefore, this is a multidisciplinary research project that integrates elements from the humanities and the social sciences. Methodologically, it integrates qualitative and quantitative approaches. Hence, hybridity is embedded in this research not only because it discusses English and Spanish writing, but because it includes textual analysis, content analysis and statistical analysis. The main finding is the deep conection between socio-political context, language, culture, identity, power and translation that supports the idea that self-translation is a postcolonial act, which in the case of Puerto Rico is strongly related to hybridity as an everyday practice of identity affirmation.

This dissertation examines the narrative and psychological significance of sister relationships in works from late Victorian fiction through literary modernism and contemporary cinema, including Olive Schreiner's From Man to Man, May Sinclair's The Three Sisters, Jessie Fauset's Plum Bun, Dorothy West's The Living Is Easy, Colette's "The Toutounier," Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers, and the films of Diane Kurys, Allison Anders, Jane Campion, and Margarethe von Trotta. The study uses various classic and revisionist psychoanalytic approaches to frame the comparative analysis of fictional representations of sisters in selected texts from different historical and cultural traditions. An overview of psychoanalytic responses to the sibling bond yields no single explanatory model. However, contemporary discussions of intersubjectivity and female bonding by Winnicott, Chodorow, Gilligan, Baker, Kristeva and others suggest useful ways of appraising the representation of internal and external bonds between female siblings. From a critique of the Victorian legacy of sisterhood in Schreiner's novel to the role of sisters in "passing" novels to the political and personal conflicts between sisters in von Trotta's cinema, twentieth-century authors and directors have imagined sisterhood in a variety of ways to suggest its enduring influence. Splitting and doubling are recurrent themes in these narratives about sisters whose "transference" relationship with each other exposes their competition and identification, rivalry and attachment. Increased attention to the representation of sibling bonds in literary and cinematic texts allows for new avenues of interpretation of works that have been neglected by feminist and psychoanalytic theory and literary history. The representation of sisters is a missing link in analyses of the "family drama" which have focused exclusively on oedipal and preoedipal conflicts between parent and child. In modern and contemporary fiction and film, traditional patterns of sisterly opposition and competition (the good sister/bad sister model) are retold in the context of the complex role of intersubjective identification and female bonding in women's identity formation. In the works under study, the sister relationship expresses a crucial dimension of women's psychosexual development, which expands our understanding of the meaning of sisterhood beyond that of an idealizing metaphor.

This is an investigation into the ways that postmodern theories and feminist theories have both failed to learn from each other and yet also reveal the blindness' implicit in each other. Postmodern theory has consistently failed to engage gender in any significant way and feminist theory has consisted failed to find the usefulness of the methods and questions posed by postmodern theorists. Both approaches have failed to address the very real and important perspectives of the post colonial others who have been addressing the questions of race, gender, history, and agency for hundred of years. The second half of this investigation looks specifically at the work of three African American women writers, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor and Gayle Jones, in their most recent work. All three novels, Beloved, Mama Day and Corregidora are historical novels concerned with the legacy of slavery, and these narratives themselves exceed all the expectation for postmodern theory and feminist theory in inviting us to understand the relationship between history, memory and the now. In effect the work of these writers succeeds in "theorizing the present" in ways that both feminism and postmodernism fail.

This dissertation examines how contemporary African American women writers have used the novel of selfhood to represent African American girls' and women's struggle to achieve self-understanding and development during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. In doing so, this dissertation expounds on the ways in which race, class, gender, sexuality, social justice movements, and community affect African American female characters' journey toward selfhood. Through this study I am interested in exploring the messages African American communities communicate to girls and women about life, race, gender, and sexuality. How characters interpret this information and then negotiate between their individual desires and goals and the expectations of their communities, as well as the effect learning about African American or African Diaspora history and culture has on protagonists are also central concerns here. The novels analyzed in this study are Alice Walker's Meridian (1976), Ntozake Shange's Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo (1982), and Toni Morrison's Love (2003). Drawing upon male, female, and African American Bildungsroman scholarship, Civil Rights and Black Power ideology, and black feminist theoretical frameworks, this study offers an interdisciplinary close textual analysis of African American women's novels of selfhood depicting several models of self-development to illuminate the struggles African American women face in their journey toward selfhood. This dissertation diverges from previous scholarship in that it places greater emphasis on the role of community and explores the influence the social justice movements of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, specifically the Civil Rights, Black Power/Black Arts, and Women's liberation movements had on African American women's self-concept.

This dissertation analyzes three novels by contemporary female Caribbean and Latin American Afro-descendent writers of the diaspora: Peruvian Lucía Charún-Illescas' Malambo (2001), Brazilian Ana Maria Gonçalves' Um defeito de cor (2006), and Puerto Rican Mayra Santos-Febres' Fe en disfraz (2009). In these texts, the old and the new intermingle in the space of the narrative. The colonial past is reexamined and reconstructed out of the need to understand its reminiscences into the present and the necessity to transform the future. These decolonial narratives of the contemporary African diaspora foster an expression of the interconnection between the two colonial spaces: where the African-descendents, especially the black female, were the objects of submission, and the present time, where the remnants of the past persist. I propose a reading of how the writers decolonize via history, memory, myth, and sex by challenging the construction of the colonial patriarchal rule and rewriting a new history to include the marginalized voices. Decolonization here implies a deconstruction of the image of colored people, especially black women in colonial time where they were deprived of their culture, personhood, and subjectivity. The writers propose a social transformation in which colonialism, racism, sexism, and classism are confronted and a new society is created, without the colonial power structure. The writers return to the roots of power and domination and examine the dynamics of the interconnection of gender, race, class, and sexuality and propose a new gender paradigm.

Jewish Americans have been incredibly adept in public relations, and this study traces the ways in which Jewish narratives were used in the twentieth century to perform cultural work for the community. We Are Chosen begins with the premise that established Jews in Galveston, Montreal, New York, and Buenos Aires defined Jewishness in attractive terms in the early 1900s for political expediency, to challenge negative perceptions by non-Jews and promote esteem among Jews, and that these terms continue to inform conceptions of Jewish identity. Geographically, the project looks beyond (as well as in) New York, focuses on three dominant tropes (giving, mobility, and assimilation), and examines how and why these themes effectively translate religious election (“chosenness”) in the secular sphere. Jewish narratives and their ennobling rhetorics are often taken as a matter of course, even in the field of Jewish American Studies, but should be understood as products of a particular historical moment. As vehicles for positive public relations, Jewish narratives mask voices deemed unattractive or potentially threatening. Drawing from essays, organizational reports, periodical and historical writings, and works of Jewish American literature, individual chapters put dominant and protesting voices in conversation with one another and explore why some images are deemed “good for the Jews” and others are considered self-hating. Examining the history of Jews in other places does not detract from the importance of New York to Jewish American history or memory, but insists that there are more complex and dynamic stories that include, but are not limited to, New York and its mythic Lower East Side.

Elena Bertoncini Zúbková, internationally renowned scholar and esteemed teacher of Swahili language and literature, passed away on 19th September 2018 in Pisa, Italy. In this obituary, her disciple Flavia Aiello pays tribute to her life and her major achievements. She highlights that Elena Bertoncini Zúbková educated generations of scholars in Italy and across Europe who specialised in Swahili studies, and had a remarkable impact on the advancement of Swahili literary studies. May she rest in peace.

This thesis critically examines the intersections between whiteness and terror/horror in texts produced during the long eighteenth century. I reframe the Gothic as a migratory Transatlantic, colonial mode that problematizes eighteenth-century distinctions between terror as a form of the intellectual sublime and horror as a bodily reaction that generates shock and aversion. Drawing upon contemporary Black Feminism(s), I analyze Enlightenment theories of mind and objective reason and consider whiteness as a spectral and material presence throughout long eighteenth-century writing, with which the Gothic mode grapples directly. Highlighting how the Gothic operates in Transatlantic spaces that rehearse the legacies of violence enacted against Black and racialized peoples, my project contends that classifications such as terror-Gothic (i.e., psychological horror) and horror-Gothic (i.e., bodily horror) are arbitrary and reductive; instead, the Gothic responds to colonialism by imagining that the experience of embodied knowledge is a conflation of both. Centered primarily as a study of literary methodology, this thesis presents readings of three works of literature that operate within and against the backdrop of Anglo-American Enlightenment myths of white supremacy: Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789), Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland: or, The Transformation: An American Tale (1798), and Matthew Lewis’s Journal of a West India Proprietor: Kept During a Residence in the Island of Jamaica (1834). This thesis puts questions to each text, regarding the reproduction, mobilization, and subversion of whiteness in their portrayal of terror/horror; the use of mobility to illustrate preoccupations with displacement, socio-political, and cultural conditions; the depiction of Black life, agency, and subjectivity despite oppression. By unraveling complexities of whiteness and terror/horror, noting the Gothic modality’s haunting/haunted relationship to colonial discourses of power, this study emphasizes the enduring relevance of these themes in understanding contemporary racial imaginaries. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This project examines the entangled relationship between whiteness and terror/horror in literature from the long eighteenth century. Drawing from contemporary Black Feminist theories to analyze Transatlantic works that make use of the Gothic mode, this study reframes historical concepts of terror and horror as separate affective categories, reimagining the foundational elements of Gothicism, to underscore the inseparable nature of psychological and physical manifestations of colonial oppression. Focusing on race and racialization, I illustrate how specific conceptions of whiteness generated, bolstered, and deployed terror/horror to shape the experiences of Black humans inhabiting Transatlantic locations in the period and beyond. I think with(in) Black Feminism(s) to delve into the impact of Enlightenment philosophy on Gothic narratives that grapple with slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. By retheorizing the Gothic as a migratory mode, I emphasize its capabilities to address the haunting legacies of whiteness and its violent manifestations across time and space.

Okwire’shon:’a, or trees of the forest, guide the methodology and epistemology of my doctoral research. The Rotinonhsonni creation history tells us that all life is made from the clay of the earth (Mother Earth or First Woman), and therefore everything in Creation shares an origin in and a connection to the earth. Thus, Rotinonhsonni thoughtways understand trees to be part of an interconnected network of land-based knowledge that spans from time immemorial to the present. As extensions of First Woman, trees are literally my relations, my ancestors. While onkwehonwe (original peoples) have long been able to tap into the knowledge of the land (and many still do), colonialism has significantly disrupted our landed and place-based relationships and consequently our ability to read the land. This, in turn, disrupts the ability of onkwehonwe to live within the principles of Kayanerekowa. My dissertation explores, through juxtapositions of Rotinonhsonni oral histories, contemporary Indigenous literature, and a series of trees, the possibility of (re)learning to read and communicate with the land. Using a trans-Indigenous methodology, my project examines three branches of land-centered philosophy within Indigenous literature: enacting creation stories; spirit agency; and internalized ecological holism. By reading different Indigenous texts across from Rotinonhsonni epic teachings, my trans-Indigenous methodology affirms Indigenous alliances with the environment and with each other, their long-standing presence on and stewardship of the land, and the value and validity of knowledge that is ancestral, adaptive, and alive. I argue that by carrying forward land-centered knowledge contemporary Indigenous literature stimulates an awareness of the land and nonhuman societies as cognizant and in communication with us. Renewing relations and modes of relationality to the land in this way re-energizes Kayanerekowa, and has the potential to strengthen Indigenous efforts for self-determination, knowledge resurgence, land reclamation, and nation-to-nation alliances. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This project demonstrates a cyclical process of reading between a small selection of contemporary Indigenous literatures, Indigenous oral histories and cosmologies, and a series of trees indigenous to Turtle Island. Tree-readings are attempted through three methods: aesthetic (metaphoric) interpretation; analysis through Indigenous oral histories; and, listening to the thoughts of the trees themselves. Each tree’s teachings are then bundled together as a framework for reading a work of Indigenous narrative art that demonstrates similar principles and emphases. The overall aim of this work is to model how landed processes of coming to know develop an awareness of the land and all nonhuman societies as alive, thinking, and possessing agency. In a Rotinonhsonni (Six Nations) context, this renewal of landed consciousness strengthens the principles of righteousness, reason, and power, which sustain the Kayanerekowa (Great Law of Peace).