Abstracts Category : Other

Urban Intimacies: Reading Public Women in the Postcolonial Caribbean

by Dana Linda

This dissertation is the first book-length study of Caribbean island literatures from the English- and Spanish-speaking regions to explore the material and metaphorical geographies of prostitution anchored in the port cities of Jamaica, Trinidad, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. Although studies of urban space are typically oriented towards metropolitan centers of Caribbean migration, this project foregrounds the port city as a geographical space that is bound up with the figure of the public woman in what I am calling a relationship of intimacy. Its alternative literary historiography extends post-independence Caribbean literature of citizenship and nationhood to contemporary writers who destabilize both the island paradise myth and national conceptions of unity. In particular, I argue that this alternative gendered spatial imaginary provides a dynamic model that complicates the imposed colonial boundaries of race, gender, class, and nation that have been reproduced by the postcolonial state. My dissertation builds on sociological studies of sex work in the Caribbean by making a case for the role that creative narrative interventions play in bringing greater legitimacy and visibility to women who are marginalized within nationalist discourses The case studies to follow examine eight primary texts set or produced over the course twentieth century that center the major port cities of Jamaica, Trinidad, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. Each chapter pairs a canonical work from the post-independence era with a more recent fictional engagement, and each pairing informs a culturally-responsive approach to the public woman and her associated spatial tropes of prostitution. The first chapter looks to the novels of diasporic Jamaican authors Orlando Patterson and Kerry Young, arguing that while Patterson uses a rhetoric of fallenness and uneven geographic mobility to show the limits of Jamaican multicultural modernity, Young exposes the metaphors of containment and abjection that underline this narrative. The second chapter investigates performance-oriented works of Earl Lovelace and Tony Hall from Trinidad for the way they redirect a national discourse of increased indebtedness away from imperial dynamics of domination and dependency in favor of celebrating the Carnival public woman. The third chapter turns its attention to Puerto Rican writers Luis Rafael Snchez and Mayra Santos-Febres and their divergent engagements with tourist and nationalist discourses through the female figure of the brothel in San Juan and Ponce. The fourth chapter bridges the gap between official and dissident Cuban novelists, arguing that both Miguel Barnet and Fernando Velzquez Medina employ the rumbera and the recurrent trope of Havanas ruins to recuperate an alternative literary vision of the city that rejects the sex-based and text-based repressions perpetuated by the revolutionary state.