Towards a trans-Caribbean poetics: A new aesthetic of power and resistance
type: CreativeWork
description: This dissertation analyzes how Caribbean-American writers living elsewhere challenge common ideas about power, violence and oppression through the reinterpretation of Caribbean dictatorial regimes in their fiction, and how their stories fare in comparison to other narrative traditions such as the Latin American dictator novel genre. The works of Julia Alvarez (The Dominican Republic), Edwidge Danticat (Haiti) and Junot Díaz (The Dominican Republic) share thematic and biographical similarities and reveal an emerging aesthetic with definite textual and thematic traits that I identify as Trans-Caribbean, a poetics with four main constitutive aspects. First, it addresses the tensions between individualism and collectivism in Caribbean discourse. Second it addresses the implicit role of logo centrism in shaping cultural narratives. Third, it presents fragmentation as a phenomenon that is both discursive and thematic. Finally, it develops the multiple strategies of visual and linguistic disruption in order to suspend normative representations of Caribbean identity. Trans-Caribbean Poetics is trans-continental, fragmentary, personal, relational and multilingual and suggests a plausible model to analyze discursive relations in a transnational context.
abstract: This dissertation analyzes how Caribbean-American writers living elsewhere challenge common ideas about power, violence and oppression through the reinterpretation of Caribbean dictatorial regimes in their fiction, and how their stories fare in comparison to other narrative traditions such as the Latin American dictator novel genre. The works of Julia Alvarez (The Dominican Republic), Edwidge Danticat (Haiti) and Junot Díaz (The Dominican Republic) share thematic and biographical similarities and reveal an emerging aesthetic with definite textual and thematic traits that I identify as Trans-Caribbean, a poetics with four main constitutive aspects. First, it addresses the tensions between individualism and collectivism in Caribbean discourse. Second it addresses the implicit role of logo centrism in shaping cultural narratives. Third, it presents fragmentation as a phenomenon that is both discursive and thematic. Finally, it develops the multiple strategies of visual and linguistic disruption in order to suspend normative representations of Caribbean identity. Trans-Caribbean Poetics is trans-continental, fragmentary, personal, relational and multilingual and suggests a plausible model to analyze discursive relations in a transnational context.
author: Flores-Rodriguez, Daynali
language: en
keywords: Trans-Caribbean Poetics, Caribbean literature, Latin American literature, Caribbean literature - History and criticism, Latin American literature - history and criticism, Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat, Julia Alvarez, Caribbean fiction - 20th century
date published: 2011-05-25T15:02:22Z
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:25:23Z
provider: University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/24226