Decolonial Continental Consciousness: Coalition and Performance in Multi-Ethnic Women's Literature after NAFTA

This dissertation situates the corporeal body as a site of political engagement, activism, and communication across the Western hemisphere in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. I argue that economic and political policies, like the North American Free Trade Agreement, build on the historical realities of imperial and colonial conquest in North, Central, and South America, and the Caribbean to further structure inter-continental connections in neoliberal economic terms. This comparative approach shapes my readings of hemispherically-oriented novels, short stories, and performances since 1991 as direct, performative responses to life on the continent structured by free trade.

This project theorizes nonrepresentational and nonverbal discourses, in the form of gestures, embodied cartography, and rituals, which provide a basis for new forms of realism and continental coalition. Applying performance studies to prose and poetry by Claudia Hernández, Rosario Sanmiguel, Ana Maurine Lara, Achy Obejas, Dahlma Llanos Figueroa, Toni Morrison, Karen Tei Yamashita, Leslie Marmon Silko, Ana Castillo, Janet Campbell Hale, Jeannette Armstrong, and Calixta Gabriel Xiquín, I find embodied responses that constitute a framework for understanding emergent forms of realism and continental coalition. Ultimately, I argue that to fully understand the contemporary is to move through it. This movement cannot be singular, nor can it be simply collective. Coalition is an extension of the self—where we meet, encounter, and struggle together. I suggest that this is a decolonial alteration of a continental trajectory is a form of agential realism.