Browsing by Subject "Caribbean literature"
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Item 19th century plantation counter-discourses in Juan Francisco Manzano, Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (Plácido), and Eleuterio Derkes(2010-12) Oleen, Garrett Alan; Arroyo, Jossianna; Salgado, César Augusto; Nicolopolus, James R.; Harney, Michael P.; Sidbury, James; Bernucci, LeopoldoMy purpose in writing this dissertation is to re-evaluate the works of three influential Spanish-Caribbean authors who seem to be remembered more as exceptional historical characters rather than for their literature itself. Although often considered to be important contributors to the Spanish-Caribbean literary canon, these writers have also suffered a measure of marginalization as scholars have relegated them to the status of discursive subjects rather than evaluate them as authorial agents. As a consequence, the majority of their works have not been fully recognized as important factors in nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty first century literary production. I show how in their writings – many of which have been misunderstood, under-evaluated, and/or forgotten altogether – these writers narrated their own precarious situations and lifted their voice in protest against slavery, racism and economic oppression at a time when the dominant discourses and heavy-handed controls of the Spanish colonial government strictly forbid them to do so. These authors are Juan Francisco Manzano, Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (Plácido) and Eleuterio Derkes. Because these authors lived in Cuba (Manzano and Plácido) and Puerto Rico (Derkes) as colonial subjects underneath the oppressive structures of their respective plantation and hacienda economies based on sugar production and slave labor, they experienced difficult colonial conditions and as such are able to narrate this life through a unique perspective that other writers associated with the dominant discourses of the time could not. While these brands of hegemony were indeed forced upon them as writers and artists, it did not stop them from narrating and communicating their unique Spanish Caribbean perspective. I show how these authors, as marginalized figures of nineteenth century plantation society, engineered their own discourses around these hegemonic institutions – writing between the lines of hegemony and concurrent with it at the same time – in order to create an alternative image of nineteenth century Spanish Caribbean society that requires further critical consideration and perspective.Item Current News Sources for Latin America and the Caribbean Area(Benson Latin American Collection, 1994-01) Delepiani, Oscar E.The purpose of this guide is to provide a list of periodicals which cover news about Latin American and Caribbean countries. Not included are journals which emphasize culture or history, or scholarly and research journals. Also excluded are news magazine intended primarily for Hispanic readers in the United States. Only titles currently received in the Benson Collection are listed but the library holds many similar periodicals, no longer received, which may be found through the online catalog, UTCAT.Item Re-humanizando al sujeto alienado : extrañamientos de lo masculino en la narrativa existencial cubana(2015-05) Watlington, Francis David; Salgado, César Augusto; Arroyo, Jossianna; Afolabi, Omoniyi; Borge, Jason; Roncador, Sonia; Perez-Ortiz, MelanieMy dissertation Re-Humanizing the Alien: Estranged Masculinities in Cuban Existentialist Fiction examines the role of alienation in the construction of compensatory masculine subjectivities during the social, cultural and industrial modernization of Cuba, dating from the mid-19th century until the initial stages of the Cuban Revolution, in the 1960s. In this project I analyze, primarily from the perspective of gender studies, transcontinental philosophy (European and Latin American) and the history of ideas in the Hispanic-American world, the shifts in masculine identity formation among Cuban intellectuals and writers whose work deals with the relation between angst and freedom in the context of crisis tendencies in the developing colonial/postcolonial state. For this purpose, I will analyze the works of the following Cuban authors: José Antonio Saco (1797-1879), Juan Francisco Manzano (1797-1854), Enrique Labrador Ruiz (1902-1991), Virgilio Piñera (1912-1979), Edmundo Desnoes (1930-) and Calvert Casey (1924-1969). Studying these writers and their literary production, I will be able to contribute to current debates on existentialism with regard to the role of masculinities in generating forms of resistance against patriarchal and colonial oppression. Moreover, I demonstrate how these gender constructs interrogate traditional notions of Cuban and Spanish Caribbean modernity by deploying existential narratives in the service of fashioning a literary-grounded decolonial ethics. Consequently, I provide a critical reading of the topic of existentialism which demonstrates the validity of the notion of gender as a useful category of analysis for understanding the role of affect in destabilizing cultural gender norms. This project ultimately aims to analyze alternative ways of expressing masculinity which have emerged from within literary negotiations of identity, thus allowing for a more inclusive and comprehensive evaluation of Cuban male subjectivities, and a deeper understanding of the historical development of social and economic relations in the nation-state, as well as its engagement with ideology, race, national character and politics.Item Ruination in the Caribbean novel : being at the end of the world(2023-04-19) Nelson, Lauren Lollie; Wilks, Jennifer M., 1973-; Houser, Heather; Hoad, Neville; DeLoughrey, ElizabethThis dissertation examines twentieth and twenty-first century Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean novels using a postcolonial ecocritical framework. In particular, I use the Jamaican concept of ruination to analyze how the Caribbean novel offers an antihumanist counter-conceptualization of concepts like agency, apocalypse, being, and ruin. I argue that these novels offer new imaginaries for ways of being that challenge the central tenets of humanist discourse and thus recast some of the central concepts that guide our understanding of colonial modernity, namely sovereignty, freedom, revolution, and redress. Because the term indexes the way in which imperial optics misapprehend the generative capacity of unruly Caribbean landscapes, I claim that asking what has been left to ruinate allows us to seek out the leakages, revisions, and sideways movements that have persisted in the aftermath of colonialism. In my usage, ‘ruination’ is one possible pathway out of colonial understandings of being which affects not only our understanding of being-in-the-world, but also how the projected ‘end of the world’ comes to bear on the ecological realities of neocolonialism in the present moment.Item Slides of Latin America and the Caribbean(Benson Latin American Collection, 1999-01) Garner, JaneThis listing of all 35mm. slides relating to Latin America and the Caribbean currently held by the Benson Latin American Collection is arranged by country or geographic area. Slides are housed in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Unit (SRH 1.101) where they may be viewed on a hand viewer. They may be checked out for classroom presentations but are otherwise library-use only. Slides with Dewey or Library of Congress classification numbers accompany books.Item Toward a new poetics of space in Derek Walcott’s Midsummer(2016-05) Rodriguez, Gabriella; Wilks, Jennifer M., 1973-; Shingavi, SnehalCaribbean self-formation is a project in constructing a new poetics that situates itself against imposed and fixed ideas about culture, language, and personhood. For places like the Caribbean, history is indexed by linguistic and bodily fragmentations, ecological upheavals and transformations, and diasporic wanderings to and from the islands. Literature can then be thought of as an aesthetic project in making sense of the present and visualizing alternatives for the future. Walcott’s Midsummer opens up a space in which to consider the relationship between human beings, landscapes, and culture. Derek Walcott’s Midsummer captures the cadences of life and time in the tropics: the time between a moment, a season, a life, or an era. This particular sequence of fifty-four poems records a full year, the period between one summer and the next. The liminal space of the in-between in Midsummer lends itself to reversals of time, the poems traverse back and forth between the then and now, taking time to linger and take pause in memory and imagination, but also in moments of lived experience. The aperture created between the past and future frees us to think about the multiple, uncertain temporalities of the present, and the position of the poet between two cultures mimes the central ambivalence of midsummer. In these poetic musings, Walcott considers his own positionality vis-à-vis the Caribbean and its colonial past, Europe, high literary culture, and poetry itself. It explores the extent to which place produces literature or that literature produces place and culture, leaving open a productive possibility of rearticulating the conceptual framework for the idea of culture.Item Urban dialogues : rethinking gender and race in contemporary Caribbean literature and music(2013-05) Torrado, Lorna Judith; Arroyo, Jossianna; Martínez-San Miguel, Yolanda; Robbins, Jill; Polit, Gabriela; Salgado, CésarHow are music, literature and migration connected? How are these transnational conversations affecting the way countries construct their national discourses today? This dissertation studies how gender and race are constructed and questioned in the 'cross-genre' dialogue among contemporary urban literature, performance, and reggaeton music produced in Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and New York City from the1990s-2000s. This ongoing dialogue of marginalized music and literature, made possible by the accessibility of new media, results in a unique urban configuration in which gender and racial identities are negotiated, resulting in the reinforcement of a trans-Caribbean cultural circuit. Following a non-traditional structural approach this dissertation proposes a new analytical and reading model beginning with the Puerto Rican diaspora's cultural production in New York City as a point of departure, and from there expands to the rest of the Spanish Caribbean. I specifically focus on the writings of poets Willie Perdomo (NYC), and Guillermo Rebollo Gil (PR), the videos and lyrics of the reggaeton artists Tego Calderón and Calle 13 (PR), and the music and literary work of Rita Indiana Hernández (DR) in order analyze the complex interplay between music and literary texts to convey gender and racial imaginaries. I conclude that these literary, cultural, and performative texts abolish "national" configurations and are being replaced by broader definitions of "us," race, and gender to address the complexities of contemporary Caribbean transnational identitary circuits.