Although critics often use the term "Caribbean consciousness" and critics of Jacques-Stephen Alexis often speak of his antillanite, there does not seem to exist a systematic study of this consciousness in his novels. The purpose of this dissertation was to analyse how this consciousness is expressed in the novels Compere General Soleil, Les Arbres musiciens, and L'Espace d'un cillement, and how these novels contribute to creating this consciousness in the reader. In addition to the introduction, the present work comprises five chapters and a conclusion. Chapter 2 presents the writer and places him in his social, historical and literary contexts. Chapters 3 and 4 explore the cultural and geopolitical criteria which redefine space and spatial relationships within the novels. Chapter 3 studies the relocalization of Haiti in its continental and Caribbean contexts. Chapter 4 analyses Alexis' redefinition of Haitian space which re-evaluates those spaces undermined by official discourse; it also studies his use of the language of nature. Chapter 5 examines the writer's answer to the temporal and historical dispossession which has traditionally plagued the Caribbean person. It analyses the re-writing of history from a Caribbean perspective rather than from a Western or Westernized one. Chapter 6 studies how the novels express a common Caribbean identity. It proposes a definition of Caribbean culture born from a creative process of cultural marronnage and brassage. It explores the racial dimension of the Caribbean consciousness and examines the cultural metissage present in the novels. The conclusion retraces fundamental elements and themes in the Alexian discourse that emerge as expressions of a Caribbean identity and consciousness, allowing Alexis to say, in his last novel, "We, people of the Caribbean ... " ("Nous, gens de la Caraibe ... "). Among these elements, the conclusion stresses a common geographical experience of fragmentation, a common historical process and a shared process of creolization or cultural as well as physical metissage.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:dissertations-7765 |
| Date | 01 January 1990 |
| Creators | Canales Azpeitia, Maria Cristina |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest |
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