Transamerican ghosts: The face, the abyss, and the dead of new world post -coloniality.
Item
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Title
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Transamerican ghosts: The face, the abyss, and the dead of new world post -coloniality.
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Identifier
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AAI3325379
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identifier
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3325379
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Creator
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Perez, Richard.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Meena Alexander
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Date
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2008
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American | Literature, Caribbean | Literature, Latin American
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Abstract
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This study entitled Transamerican Ghosts: the Face, the Abyss, and the Dead of New World Post-Coloniality, examines the philosophical, historical, and psychic forces embodied by the specter in the Transamerican imaginary. I will argue that a critical sensitivity to the ghost offers uncanny entries into the American post-colonial subject, revealing the different ways it is shaped by capitalism, colonial histories, and social marginalization. The specter is a residual manifestation of socially unconscious forces that imaginatively draws Transamerican writers into complex explorations of identity. Significantly, the etymological connotation of haunt is to bring or return home. It is via the imagination that the repressed content the ghost brings/returns emerges into legibility. Thus, the writers in this study turn to spectrality in order to decipher traumatic traces and symbols that have been veiled from social and historical view. Identity, as the writers of this study demonstrate, is only partially located on the material surfaces of the body. The post-colonial subject of the Americas is both the corporeal remainder of a colonized past and a body haunted by a symbolic stranger that exists outside, within, and beyond the borders of the body or the real. The post-colonial subject in the Americas, then, is haunted doubly: historically, by an inscrutable past that it must learn to read through the hints and fragments that remain; and socially, through its own ontological location in the real where s/he is rendered ghostly by numerous violent exclusions. What is at stake, according to this analysis, is a fictional response by writers in the Americas, to a series of thematic threads that emerge as a result of contacts with colonial ghosts and social states of spectrality. In four chapters I work through these threads. Chapter One examines an ethics of the face as a paradoxical and magical practice of defacement in Piri Thomas' Down These Mean Streets. Chapter Two traces the curse of difference in Junot Diaz's collection of short stories Drown and his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The third and four chapters explore a revelatory relationship between the wound, the abyss, and the archive in Derek Walcott's epic poem Omeros and Toni Morrison Beloved. What emerges in these readings is a more acute understanding of the role of spectrality in the history and social construction of the Americas.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
