Towards a trans-Caribbean poetics: A new aesthetics of power and resistance

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 Diaz (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.