Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority Commons^™

Lyrical Rapturing In Danticat’S Work: Transcending Haitian Cultural Silence Through Narrative, Johanna M. Piard

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Edwidge Danticat’s work has been praised for the visceral, deeply personal ways she writes violence, suffering, death, and loss, leading scholars to theorize that dehumanization is a central motif in the Haitian and Haitian diasporic experience. This causes Haiti to be generally considered, as Jerry Philogene describes, “a socially dead space”. Danticat ventures into this “socially dead space” in her recent memoirs, reflecting on the traumatic experiences of her two paternal figures, her father and Uncle Joseph, her complex feelings around her mother’s death, and the value of Haitian art in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake. Danticat creates a …

Split At The Root, Robert S. Gryder

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Influenced by— and sometimes in conversation with— diverse literary voices such as Dorothy Allision (BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA), Harry Crews (A CHILDHOOD), and Mark Doty (FIREBIRD), SPLIT AT THE ROOT is a literary bildungsroman told primarily in the narrative mode. The memoir traces the narrator’s volatile beginnings in the trailer parks of rural South Carolina in the 1980s to the day he accepted, sight unseen, an offer of admission to Yale University, boarding a plane in 1993 for the first time in his life. This memoir explores the narrator’s quest for agency, deploying the essayist mode to interrogate along the …

What's Past Is Prologue: Transforming Trauma, Rewriting Identity In Gloria Anzaldua's "Borderlands/La Frontera" And "Light In The Dark/Luz En Lo Oscuro", Richard Edward Riley

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera and Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro are widely acknowldged as groundbreaking texts across Latinx literary canons, invoking selfhood, spirituality, activism, and politics as a queer woman of color writer.

Her language around self-dispersion is still undertheorized in what it owes to traumatic experiences discoverable in the self, body, world, and culture Anzaldua hails from. The extent of colonizing and kyriarchal damage in her work has been recognized; but the exact character of how these breakages and corresponding imperatives to regenerate oneself resemble a traumatic shock remains to be written about.

This thesis sketches frameworks …

Leaving A Little Heaven Behind With Coltrane, Or: The Performance Is The Archive, Ismael Santos

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines what an Audience-Centered Archive could look like, and the advantages of opening up the spaces of archival scholarship in connection with studies focused on Jazz. This thesis will explore how inherently self-limiting are traditional structures of the Archive, with the contradictory nature of Jazz Archives brought to the forefront: to archive a music like Jazz necessarily entails losing what makes it so special, losing the improvisational facet of Jazz. This thesis draws from sound studies and performance studies, along with a focus on the recording technologies that entail differences in interpretation and American history. This focus of …

Nights In The City Beautiful, Veronica Suarez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Nights in The City Beautiful is a collection of confessional, free verse poems that explores sexual trauma, mental health, the exigencies of marriage, and the complexities of human desire. These interconnected poems are grounded with a braided narrative and tackle taboo themes. In Part 1: Monogamy, the reader journeys into the world of Vincent and Victoria, their profound love, and their anxiety disorders. In Part 2: Polyamory, Victoria gets caught in a love triangle when she meets her publishing coworker, Peter Langley.

The book evokes the movement of Romanticism and first-and-second-generation Romantic poets such as William Blake and Lord Byron. …

Re-Imagining The Victorian Classics: Postcolonial Feminist Rewritings Of Emily Brontë, Yannel Celestrin

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS

RE-IMAGINING THE VICTORIAN CLASSICS: POSTCOLONIAL FEMINIST REWRITINGS OF EMILY BRONTË

by

Yannel M. Celestrin

Florida International University, 2018

Miami, Florida

Professor Martha Schoolman, Major Professor

Through a post-structural lens, I will focus on the Caribbean, specifically Cuba, Guadeloupe, Marie-Galante, and Roseau, and how the history of colonialism impacted these islands. As the primary text of my thesis begins during the Cuban War of Independence of the 1890s, I will use this timeframe as the starting point of my analysis. In my thesis, I will compare Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heightsand Maryse Condé’s Windward Heights. Specifically, I …

Reimagining Movements: Towards A Queer Ecology And Trans/Black Feminism, Gabriel Benavente

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis seeks to bridge feminist and environmental justice movements through the literature of black women writers. These writers create an archive that contribute towards the liberation of queer, black, and transgender peoples.

In the novel Parable of the Talents, Octavia Butler constructs a world that highlights the pervasive effects of climate change. As climate change expedites poverty, Americans begin to blame others, such as queer people, for the destruction of their country. Butler depicts the dangers of fundamentalism as a response to climate change, highlighting an imperative for a movement that does not romanticize the environment as heteronormative, but …

Border Crossings And Transnational Movements In Sandra Cisneros’ Spatial Narratives Offer Alternatives To Dominant Discourse, Raquel D. Vallecillo

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My study aims to reveal how ideologies, the way we perceive our world, what we believe, and our value judgments inextricably linked to a dominant discourse, have real and material consequences. In addition to explicating how these ideologies stem from a Western philosophical tradition, this thesis examines this thought-system alongside selections from Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek and Caramelo or Puro Cuento. My project reveals how Cisneros’ spatial narratives challenge ideologies concerning the border separating the United States and Mexico, which proves significant as the project of decolonization and understanding of identity formation is fundamentally tied to these geographical …

The Linguistic Market Of Codeswitching In U.S. Latino Literature, Marilyn Zeledon

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a multidisciplinary study that brings together the fields of literature, sociolinguistics, and cultural studies in order to understand the motivation and meaning of English-Spanish codeswitching or language alternation in Latino literature produced in the United States. Codeswitching was first introduced in Latino literature around the time of the Chicano Movement in the 1970s and has been used as a distinctive feature of Latino literary works to this day. By doing a close linguistic analysis of narratives by four different authors belonging to the largest Latino communities in the country (Chicano, Puerto Ricans, Dominican Americans, and Cuban Americans), …