This study addresses factors that contribute to women's madness in African and Caribbean literature as depicted in four novels by Mariana Bâ, Ken Bugul, and Myriam Warner-Vieyra. In these texts written by women, the loss or absence of family love in childhood and adolescence, th…
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This study formulates and attempts to respond to a series of questions concerning the expression of pessimism and optimism in selected French and Francophone novels, films and critical writings of the twentieth century. Why, I ask, are so many works of modern French fiction so d…
This dissertation examines the use of mortuary tropes for the articulation of identities in seven Francophone Black narratives: Jacques Roumain's Gouverneurs de la rosée, Jean-Claude Fignolé's Les possédés de la pleine lune and Maryse Condé's Traversée de la mangrove—for the Car…
In this dissertation I investigate the representations of cultural identity in select francophone texts of the Caribbean, North Africa and West Africa. I have deemed it important to explore the concept of cultural identity in this body of literature because these texts are roote…
This dissertation examines feminine subjectivity and the relation of the feminine subject to “home” and “nation” in five late twentieth-century Francophone women's novels. The primary texts are: Simone Schwarz-Bart's Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle (1972), Maryse Condé's Trave…
In the body of this dissertation, I interpret the “style in which,” the African diaspora is “imagined” in the works of post-1950 black women creative writers from different national traditions. I contend that while the black women writers I discuss can be taken up as participati…
This dissertation examines the imaginative ways in which three postcolonial writers overcome a fractured collective past by creating a double-voiced discourse narrative framework that allows them to envision a reality that might-have-been while acknowledging the presence of domi…
This dissertation focuses on reactions to the French canon in four Francophone novels. The study examines the use of allusions to, quotations from, and parallels with French canonical works in an effort to determine how these canonical works are mobilized in the creation of a ne…
This dissertation is a comparative study of selected novels by Francophone African and Caribbean women. The analysis draws its theoretical framework from Frantz Fanon's writings on violence and on sexual politics. Fanon, like his peers, undertook the issue of violence in the col…
This dissertation explores the emergence from 1967 to 1985 of first-person novels written in French by women writers from France and Francophone countries, novels whose prevailing emotional tenor is anger. It attributes the cause for this phenomenon to global upheavals of the er…
“Narratives of Conflict and the Emergence of Community” explores narratives of communities in conflict and locates alternative configurations of community through difficult but necessary recognition and responsibility. Conflict is sometimes characterized as occurring because of …
This dissertation uses Bakhtinian intertextuality as a heuristic to read in pairs six contemporary African and Caribbean women's novels. The three dialogues offer alternative literary histories to those of the dominant canons, thus simultaneously constructing and resisting liter…
Simone Schwarz-Bart (1938-) and Albertine Sarrazin (1937-1967) offer an example of the cultural diversity that French Literature provides to the readers. Two of Albertine Sarrazin's novels, L'Astragale and La Cavale, were published in 1965; the third one La Traversiere in 1966. …
This dissertation examines the representation of complex mother figures presented in Francophone literature. I focus my analysis on literature from three distinct Francophone regions: the French Caribbean, North Africa, and Quebec. Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle (1972) by Sim…
A significant body of literature in Francophone North and West Africa, and the French Antilles describes the pain and pleasure of the indigenous child growing up under colonial rule or in postcolonial societies. In the dissertation, I propose that the literary project of remembe…
Definitely, this dissertation's central intellectual and political aims are rooted in a guiding principle of Caribbean womanhood; and, with black women's bodies located at the center, the goal of this study is to provide new alternatives to understanding "writing the body" by lo…
Anthropologists, sociologists and students of culture study food, eating and cuisine because they can provide insight into gender, power and even economic relations that structure a society. The way that people react to, think about and write about this most basic form of consum…
The influence of globalization in contemporary society is widespread, generating spaces governed by international market forces rather than by local or national institutions and allowing the transmission of information and images to global audiences. Such phenomena seem to promo…