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theses

While the archival turn in the Humanities has, by and large, focused on metaphysical conceptualizations of archives, the field of Archival Science privileges the study of the physical characteristics and material importance of our modern archival records and repositories. Both assume the nation-state and continental frameworks as their units of analysis. My dissertation, drawing on (Spanish, Anglophone, and Francophone) Caribbean literature, history, and politics, thus attends to ways that Afro-Caribbean and Caribbean diasporic narratives representing (trans)national archival practices illustrate archipelagic and decolonial conceptions of archiving and diasporic belonging; which I find capable of bridging the material/metaphysical, national/transnational, together with insular/continental interruptions that characterize modern archival theory and practice in the Humanities and beyond. Drawing on an assemblage of literary, historical, legal, visual, and scientific texts, including the crónicas of conquest from the early colonial period in the Americas, the drama of William Shakespeare and Simone Schwarz-Bart, fiction by Andrew Holleran, Tiphanie Yanique, and Junot Díaz, nonfiction by Jamaica Kincaid, and archival video footage of the U.S. National Archives Building, I formulate a theory of the coloniality of modern archival power; showing how the legacies of the global history of European colonization—starting with(in) the Caribbean archipelago—continue to shape our archival imaginaries, records, and repositories today in the era of postcoloniality. In all, the broader intellectual contributions of the project are twofold. The Archipelago and the Archive demonstrates the value of Comparative Literature to the field of Island Studies, the latter of which has, until more recently, overlooked the methodological contributions of literary analysis in favor of quantitative and qualitative Social Science research methods. Second, the dissertation foregrounds the role that archipelagic and decolonial frameworks of analysis play in efforts to understand the respective histories of Western modernity, the modern nation-state, and the modern (national) archive and how the three, together, consolidate in the crossing of archival power and the coloniality of power.
Engaging with the archipelagic staging of modernity’s war paradigm in William Shakespeare’s final play The Tempest (1611), chapter one asserts that the transnational history of nineteenth and twentieth-century U.S. imperialism abroad in the Caribbean contributes to the domestic history of the U.S. National Archive building in Washington, D.C. established in 1934. Shifting from chapter one's consideration of the physical space of the modern (national) archive, chapter two turns, instead, to an analysis of the coloniality of archival power through a close reading of the archival imaginary in Andrew Holleran's debut novel Dancer from the Dance (1978). I argue that the canonical Dancer articulates a literary archive of gay 1970s NYC evidencing the insular sites and sights of the novel's white middle-class gay male characters exclusively; and by doing so, contributes to a queer/ing of coloniality and the Wynterian category of Man, one and the other together. The third chapter integrates the study of coloniality, archival institutions, and archival imaginaries together to address the role that non-human actors or agents too play in the production of history. Through a close reading of Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place (1988) and Tiphanie Yanique’s “The Bridge Stories,” I conceptualize the mold that jeopardizes the material integrity of historical records preserved in the tropical archives of the Caribbean today as a heuristic for explaining the imperiled conditions of many of the Caribbean's colonial archive in the era of postcoloniality. Now equipped with a view from the “underside” of the Modern/Colonial/Capitalist World-system, the fourth and final chapter of the dissertation returns to the question of the (national) domestic archive broached in chapter one. I perform a comparative analysis of Simone Schwartz-Bart’s only play Your Handsome Captain (1987) and Junot Díaz’s first novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), focusing specifically on the respective representations of the domestic archives of the working-class communities of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. The final chapter argues that in these literary representations of the domestic archives we find an alternative vision of the modern archive: one realized between and beyond, rather than exclusively within, national and continental frameworks.

ETD_9832

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

doi:10.7282/t3-gcby-3s05

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.