Afro-Spirituality, Diasporic Commons, and Performative Politics in Caribbean Women's Narratives

Abstract

My dissertation, “Afro-Spirituality, Diasporic Commons, and Performative Politics in Caribbean Women’s Narratives,” analyzes late twentieth- and twenty-first-century Caribbean literature and, to a lesser extent, musical performance. I apply a comparative methodology to assemble the work of diverse Black and women-of-color writers who narrate from Puerto Rico, Dominica, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and New York City (Ana Lydia Vega, Mayra Santos-Febres, Jamaica Kincaid, Rita Indiana, and Edwidge Danticat). This project takes as its main topic stories of subjects bearing class, racial, gender, and sexual underprivileged positions who undergo spatial, identity, and bodily uprooting via geographic transits, trans-genderisms, and physical proximity to metaphysical lives (spirits, deities, nature). My work proposes innovative dialogues between Latin American, Caribbean, Afro-diasporic, and Latinx critic-theoretical fields, updating relational frameworks through two main strategies: 1) the revision of key sociopolitical formations (e.g., Puerto Rico’s modernization, Haitian dictatorships, neoliberalism and border conflicts in the Dominican Republic) from the perspective of women narrators who promote historical rewriting and alternative world views; 2) the deconstruction of hegemonic ethnical and social representations through performative acts of the political carried out by collective subjects. Women’s intellectual perspectives, I argue, enact narrative strategies of literary democratization, comedic and metapolitics, archipelagic thinking, intersectional theory, malungaje poetics, and critical fabulations to forge affective bonds and to advance ways of being in common, intervening in the creation of transatlantic formations that I call “diasporic commons.” Advocating for connectivity beyond borders, their narrations, I demonstrate, restore collective senses of beings to deal with what is left for communities in the face of (neo)colonial legacies, the failure of modernization projects, and a collapsing environment.