Making connections and associations: Caribbean women writers recreating subjectivities in New York City

At this juncture in the theorizing of Caribbean women's narrative, there is still a need for a cross-cultural and inter-regional approach to the analysis of texts, for a more inclusive rather than exclusive vision. A comprehensive and chronological paradigm will help to identify similarities, while remaining respectful of the inter-tensions, leading to an awareness of historical, social, and philosophical structures affecting Caribbean women within and without their nations. This is possible by engaging in Caribbean feminist criticism, understanding how gender plays out in premigration societies and the host country, and developing a working terminology that describes the experience of exile from the perspective of women. This dissertation critiques Caribbean women's writings of the diaspora as they challenge fixed notions of womanhood and national identification in the construction of a space for the shaping of a new sense of self. This study approaches the city of New York as an important "contact zone" which has attracted many immigrants, particularly Caribbean women, for it is perceived as a safe haven for new opportunities in terms of social, political, and economic advancement. Michel Foucault's notions about heterogeneous spaces suggest that mankind must learn to reside in close quarters, to select multiple scenarios what best suits the individual, and to sort through countless combinations in defining the self. This dissertation relies on theoretical approaches to art and photography espoused by Susan Sontag and Walter Benjamin to understand the way female migrants to sort through mixed messages in an attempt to grasp at truth or reality in the metropolitan city. Female characters are infused with the fight-back strength to redress the injustices committed against the colonized subject, epitomizing subversive behavior that surfaces with unexpected for in diasporic situations. New York City becomes the subject of analysis, the locus from which Caribbean women adopt various subject positions. A close reading of works by Paule Marshall, Jamaica Kincaid, Esmeralda Santiago, and Angie Cruz will produce an ethnographic report to historically contextualize the decision-making process leading to migration and adaptation techniques in the receiving country. The study of economic mobility, legal status, family reunification, employment conditions, household arrangements, male/female relations, and generational conflict offers a gendered vision of migration. This will yield a poetics of regeneration where a series of dichotomies at various levels of apparently irreconcilable differences, exemplify a "phenomenon" that allows transformation and dynamic reconstitution of the self. From this transient status, women develop new survival skills like the ability to move between cultures, across borders and intersections. Home, in both physical and psychological respects, becomes a site of recovery where connections and association between past, present, and future events are possible.