Family portraits in black and white: Genealogy and narrative in post-slavery fiction from the United States and the Caribbean

The history of slavery provides a significant, yet neglected, link between the various literatures of the Americas. This dissertation examines the striking parallels in plantation family histories represented by novelists from the Caribbean and the U.S. from the late-nineteenth century to the present. By reimagining the history of slavery, these writers explore the genealogical basis of national authority and legitimacy. Specifically, they expose the paternal responsibilities which the plantocracy abdicated in the interest of their own survival under slavery and also provide possibilities for cultural preservation in its wake. Narrative itself, however, is a kind of genealogy in which events are linked together in a causal, diachronic chain. By analyzing how the narrative constructs the reader's knowledge of the family line, this study establishes the ideological dimensions of the novels vis-a-vis slavery and racial difference.;The study first explores how Cirilo Villaverde from Cuba and George Washington Cable from New Orleans both negotiate representations of cultural blackness without "contaminating" the seeing eye of their narrator or the reader; the result is a reification of national borders that would exclude a dark outsider. It also studies the explicit revisions of this visual control over racial categories in the works of the Martin Morua Delgado from Cuba, and Francis Harper and Charles Chesnutt from the U.S. who insist on an inclusion of a black genealogy within the national family. Later writers, such as the Puerto Rican Enrique Laguerre, Alejo Carpentier from Cuba, and William Faulkner, demonstrate the transformative effect on narrative of an awareness of the permeability of national boundaries in the plantation region. Rosario Ferre from Puerto Rico, Jean Rhys from the West Indies and Toni Morrison, in their turn, represent the politics of narration; they insist that the time and place of the narrator within a post-slavery society dictates what kinds of stories about the past are made possible. Collectively, these juxtapositions across national lines argue for an understanding of literature in the Americas as a constellation of divergent points of departure from the common origin of slavery.