Open Collections

Cordero Noguera, María Julieta

University of British Columbia

This dissertation starts with the conviction that the Caribbean is a site of knowledge. With an analysis of Puerto Rican Mayra Montero’s Del rojo de su sombra, Jamaican Patricia Powell’s A Small Gathering of Bones, and Guadeloupean Maryse Condé’s En attendant la montée des eaux, it privileges Caribbean intellectual heritage with its modes of thought, discourses, styles, and idiosyncrasies. I do not dismiss Western epistemic developments, or deny their geopolitical repercussions. Instead, I approach contemporary Caribbean narrative to examine how knowledge emerges from literary texts to claim authority over reasoning about itself and others. Specifically, this dissertation investigates the intersections of religion, memory, and history as they are depicted in these novels, while addressing the nonlinear experience of time, with particular emphasis on the coexistence of multiple temporalities. To carry out this project, I devise an experimental mode or method for literary analysis named archipelagic reading. This i) positions Caribbean aesthetics and scholarship at the forefront of the literary discussion; ii) acknowledges the novels as works of fiction purposefully engaged with memory-making, re-historicising, and understanding the role of religion locally; iii) invites to suspend our reliance on linearity, despite the fact that this experiment is rendered in a linear layout through the linearity of written language; iv) emphasises the richness of paradox undeterred by contradictions; v) encourages curiosity and active participation from its readership to experience the development of the arguments; vi) demands a shift in the imaginary to reorient cultural, geopolitical and linguistic coordinates toward the Caribbean; and finally vii) responds to the call echoing in the texts. To consolidate these possibilities, I offer a literary analysis of the novels that evolves in tandem with the fashioning of the research method.

Text

2024-10-28

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/89557

Hispanic Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/