Bodies Remembered: The Performance of Race, Class, and Gender in Contemporary Feminist Poetry of the Afro-Hispanic Caribbean

This dissertation answers the timely questions: how has the Black female body been represented in the contemporary poetry of the Afro-Hispanic Caribbean, and why does it matter today? In pursuit of these questions, this project compares the work of Afrofeminist poets Nancy Morejón, Georgina Herrera, and Aída Cartagena Portalatín, with the work of 21st-century writers Lourdes Vázquez, Ángela Hernández Núñez, and Elizabeth Acevedo, all of Afro-Caribbean and diasporic descent. The literary analysis of these poets is supported by an interdisciplinary framework consisting of historical overview of the African diaspora in the Caribbean, anthropological field studies on perceptions of Black bodies, and theories of gender, race, violence, and identity. Based on the work of Judith Butler, bodies for the purpose of this project are defined as physical and discursive spaces of trauma and power, the chapters of this dissertation trace how power and violence are transacted and reproduced through Black female bodies in the context of enslavement and colonization in the Caribbean. Frantz Fanon’s, Ginetta B. Candelario’s, Patricia Hill Collins, and Tanya L. Shield’s readings of Blackness as social construct linked with performance of identity are also key to the arguments of this project.

The dissertation is divided in two parts: “Part 1: Bodies in Transaction,” or power and violence being transacted through women’s bodies in their relationships to other bodies; and “Part 2: Bodies in Action,” or the Black female voice reclaiming agency in narratives of objectification to assert herself as an equal member of society and politics. Chapter 2 examines Black female poetic protagonists who illustrate Saidiya Hartman’s “discourse of seduction” by which the Black enslaved woman appears to conflate her sexually abusive relationship with her master with one of love, but is in fact aware of the limited power she holds by feigning silent consent for her survival and escape as a cimarrona. Chapter 3 turns to poetry post-cimarronaje and posits that death of a Black mother’s child from racial violence is reminiscent of the agony of childbirth and reproduces the colonial violence already enacted on the body of the mother. In Part 2, the fourth chapter reads reclamation of the Black female body in contemporary dance poetry from the fetishizing male gaze of the negrista movement in the Caribbean. And Chapter 5 compares two diasporic poets’ responses to the Eurocentric pressure on Afro-descendant women to straighten their hair, and further argues against the oversimplification of complex socio-political performance of race and class through hair and passing.