Performing subversion: A comparative study of Caribbean women playwrights (Guadeloupe, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Luisa Carpetillo, Una Marson, Maryse Conde)

My dissertation focuses on counter-discursive strategies in the plays of Luisa Capetillo (Puerto Rico), Una Marson (Jamaica), and Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe). These playwrights are presented as “foremothers” that open up the space for contemporary women's drama in the region. My ultimate goal is to set the stage for the critical reconsideration of the production of Caribbean women playwrights in the context of the dominant literary traditions/literary figures in the region.; Chapter One, “Re-imagined Communities: Caribbean Women Playwrights and the Redefinition of Identities,” surveys the scholarship on Caribbean drama, feminism, womanism, and theater, and examines the place of Caribbean women playwrights in light of questions of canon formation and a female tradition.; Chapter Two, “On Text and Gest: Luisa Capetillo and her Cross-Dressing Plays,” focuses on Capetillo's “audience awareness” and what I call the “strategic levels of cross-dressing” encoded in her plays. These literal and metaphoric “levels of cross-dressing” allowed Capetillo to reach a wider audience than would have been normally granted her.; Chapter Three, “The Return of the Repressed: Subversion and Theatrical Form in the Drama of Una Marson,” looks at the unpublished 1938 manuscript of a play by Jamaican feminist, journalist, poet, and playwright, Una Marson. My reading of the play exposes how Marson's project of representing the repressed is complicated by her lack of precedents and by the limitations of conventions afforded her by the theatrical apparatus of the time.; Chapter Four, “Talking Back in the Temple of Negritude: The Subversion Of the Postcolonial Canon in the Drama of Maryse Condé” explores the Guadeloupean playwrights' critique of Negritude through “parodic excess.”; Chapter Five, “Foregrounding Foremothers,” stages a critical dialogue between the production of Capetillo, Marson, and Condé. It explores the playwrights' use of parody and mimicry as strategic ways to foreground the construction of gender, class, and race differences as well as to question representations of “the Other.”...