Description
- Abstract:
- This dissertation argues for the interconnection of Black Diasporic and Postcolonial Studies through the frame of comparative diaspora. It does so by situating African American texts within a global frame of habit (as in chapter one on Harriet Jacobs); by analyzing realist fictions in a comparative frame with African American and South Asian diasporic contexts (as in chapter two on Charles Chesnutt and V.S. Naipaul); and by examining Afro-Caribbean diasporic texts’ engagement with indigeneity (as in chapter three on Jamaica Kincaid). It offers ‘rearrangement’ as a method of examining transnational circuits that result from, and are productive of, ‘unevenness.’ These two terms animate the project and arise in response to the over-determination of our foundational vocabularies of similarity and difference. Framed around ethical categories of habit, injury, and mourning, this dissertation examines the traffic between disciplinary and nondisciplinary ethical formations; it argues that these formations are subject to and evidence of forms of rearrangement. An account of ethics in this frame must consider oppressive, resistive, and complicit iterations of what are understood ordinarily and disciplinarily to be ethical concerns. This returns us to the question of scope and scale; it also gets to the question of form. Form is what affords a discussion of ethics in a comparative scope. I argue that literature and its contexts—historical, material, and philosophical—have an aesthetic of rearrangement. Structural commonalities, when rearranged, produce diasporic forms—including the circuit, repetition, and incorporation—which bridge close reading, critical race studies, and ethics in the project. I offer as a way of identifying and thinking through habit, the idea of form and formation itself; through injury, the circuit; and through mourning, incorporation. These formal aspects of both literary text and historical contexts ground my overarching analysis of how processes of rearrangement attend categorization (generic and racial) and unevenness in subaltern writing across North America and the Caribbean.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2020
Access Conditions
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Citation
Thomas, Anna,
"Forms of Rearrangement: Habit, Injury, and Mourning in African American and Caribbean Literature"
(2020).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:1129464/
