Spanish and Portuguese ETDs
Publication Date
Summer 7-16-2018
Abstract
This project explores how the historical contexts of the Hispanic Caribbean, including the regions of the Circum-Caribbean and the Caribbean Diasporas in the United States, have sustained dominant racial and nationalist ideologies that continue to silence or negate the identity of Afro-Caribbean subjects in national letters. My research focuses on the autobiographical and biographical writing of four Hispanic Afro-Caribbean men: Autobiografía de un esclavo (1840) by Juan Francisco Manzano¾originally published and translated to English in 1840 by Richard R. Madden¾ Klabel (2002) by Víctor Virgilio López García, Down These Mean Streets (1967) by Piri Thomas, and Las criadas de la Habana (2001) by Pedro Pérez Sarduy. I examine how these authors reproduce, negotiate, and contest notions of race and nation through the representation of their identities. Arguably, in the context of a social history of marginalization and the silencing of black voices in national cultures, these autobiographies and biography represent a contestation of modern ideals of national unity as authors call attention to their racial alterity.
At the same time, the multiple positionalities of black writers—along lines of gender, class, and national identity—complicate the process of constituting black identities. In other words, resistance to dominant discourses of race and nation is likely to be articulated through dynamics of fragmented reproduction and strategic negotiations with dominant ideas. This work will examine how autobiographical and biographical narrations encode discursive silences that, when read contextually, can uncover black resistance to or acceptance of oppressive ideologies.
Degree Name
Spanish & Portuguese (PhD)
Level of Degree
Doctoral
Department Name
Spanish and Portuguese
First Committee Member (Chair)
Eleuterio Santiago-Díaz
Second Committee Member
Kathryn McKnight
Third Committee Member
Kimberle Schumock López
Fourth Committee Member
Claude-Rheal Malary
Language
English
Keywords
Black Voices, Race and Writing, Silencing, Garífuna, Afro-Caribbean, Latin America, Caribbean Diaspora, U.S. Latino
Document Type
Dissertation
Recommended Citation
Campbell, Bryn. "Revealing Silences: The Representation of Black Identities in Hispanic Afro-Caribbean Autobiographical and Biographical Writing." (2018). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/span_etds/109
Included in
European Languages and Societies Commons, Latin American Languages and Societies Commons