Transnational Discourses, Global Entanglements: Afro-Latin American and Caribbean Literary and Cultural Production from the Nineteenth Century Onwards

Fashioning a critical discourse analysis, the dissertation centers the ongoing debate within the (re)emerging field of Comparative (World) Literature as a lens for theorizing the literary and cultural production of the Afro-descendant populations of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). It thus situates itself within the burgeoning contemporary academic fields of post-colonial, transnational, and world literature. Focusing specifically on two countries and one sub-region–Haiti, Brazil, and Hispanic America–the project calls attention to and advocates for the integration of the highly prolific and creative aesthetic and critical production since the nineteenth century of the region’s large Afro-descendant populations into the global LAC historical literary and cultural discourse as well as into the contemporary framework of the diverse literatures of the world presently being embraced as world literature. In so doing, it reclaims the Haitian imaginary and the place of this territory within the cultural and intellectual space of the LAC region as the indisputable precursor of its Afro-descendant universal perspectives, demonstrating in addition the convergence of these perspectives within the global Black diaspora as well as with leftist and anti-assimilationist Western literary and cultural movements both within the region and throughout the world. Engaging a corpus of aesthetic and cultural works that equally foregrounds male and female intellectuals and cultural producers, the project expands on critical analyses previously presented on LAC global literature within and beyond the present debate, hence advancing a more integrated and comprehensive understanding of the region’s transnational literary and cultural trajectory.