Beyond binaries: Creolized forms of resistance in African-American and Caribbean literatures (Aime Cesaire, Louise Bennett, Toni Morrison, Opal Palmer Adisa, Martinique, Jamaica)

My dissertation examines the literary contributions of four major writers from the African diaspora who deal with Creolized forms of cultural resistance in their texts. Aimé Césaire's work embodies modes of resistance that are clearly informed by the cultural, spiritual, linguistic, and political landscape of the Caribbean. Louise Bennett, Toni Morrison, and Opal Palmer Adisa redeem missing perspectives of Black women in their diverse modes of expressing subjectivity and resistance. This dissertation interrogates alternative spaces within women's narratives where the erotic is signaled as a spiritual and sexual source of female resistance and agency. In addition to positing Creolized forms of expression as sites of resistance and transformation, my dissertation will demonstrate the claim, posited by Barbara Christian in “The Race for Theory,” that Black writers find creative ways of establishing modes of theorizing. Like many African-American writers before her, Toni Morrison creatively theorizes diasporic connections and Creolized sensibilities in African American culture. The links between African American and Caribbean literatures are made more pronounced by the strategic invocation of the African cosmology in Beloved and its historical rootedness in the Caribbean literary canon. What are the Creolized modes of resistance shared by African American and Caribbean cultures, and how are they represented in the literatures from both regions?; My dissertation combines several theoretical modes of cultural and literary interpretation, including Brathwaite's model of Creolized societies, Lorde's formulation of the transformative power of female erotic energy, and Christian's analysis of the dynamic modes of theorizing that are present in Black narratives. It is through these theoretical lenses that this dissertation interrogates various modalities of resistance and transformation that inform the discursive traditions of the Black diaspora.