DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-619317
title: Emperors of invisible cities: the sovereignty of the imagination in Caribbean literature

description: My dissertation, “Emperors of Invisible Cities: The Sovereignty of the Imagination in Caribbean Literature,” explores the ability of the imagination to empower the individual, both as fictional character and reader, to make political and personal changes in her reality.  The novels I engage with all center around the social and national exclusion of individuals whose racially, culturally, and sexually hybrid identities cannot be wholly accounted for because of their inability to adhere to a myth of singular origins or to maintain distinctions between supposed binaries. These texts all produce an uncanny effect up on the reader as they unsettle comfortable notions of identity and open new possibilities for how to conceive of the individual, the community, aesthetics, and the nation through what Martinican theorist Édouard Glissant terms, a poetics of relation.  I suggest that the Uncanny, in its revelation of the supernatural, exercises political power in these novels when it shakes a reader from her habitual interpretations and makes visible what was previously invisible to the reader. ❧ With a history born from European myth, the people and cultures of the Caribbean are a product of warring indigenous Indian populations, European colonialism, African slavery, the immigration of Arab and Asian laborers, revolution, postcolonial nationalism.  The region could be perceived as a cacophonous mish-mash of cultures without social unity or cultural solidarity were it not for the popular philosophy of creolization which proudly recognizes the multiple strands of identities that make up a new, complex, and rich collectivity rooted in shared experience.  Though creolization has aided in forming culturally proud and independent nation states, often the Creole individual goes ignored or remains invisible, such as the white Creole who after emancipation belongs in neither Europe nor the Caribbean or the mixed-race single woman who refuses to abide by her society’s demands of racial or gender distinctions. My project refers to these diverse characters as Creole, as they claim multiple and even opposing identifications simultaneously and challenge their society’s assumptions of difference, revealing the constructed-ness of the “knowledge” it relies upon. ❧ I theorize the imperial quest for knowledge as a form of possession with the aid of Le città invisibili, a novel whose author, Italian national icon Italo Calvino, was ironically born in Cuba.  Read outside of its conventional classifications, Calvino’s novel speaks directly to the Caribbean with concern to evading dominion and crafting modes of self-possession, such as relying upon one’s physical senses alone to know and confirm reality rather than society’s prescriptions of race, gender, and their subsequent values.  In studying Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) I demonstrate how the uncanny aids the reader in recognizing an individual’s imaginative sovereignty, allowing for previously regarded defeats to be revealed as individual’s struggles against and victories over oppression.  Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother (1996) and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night (1996) explore how the imagination both enables and empowers excluded individuals to form communities, and Derek Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound (2000) illustrates the personal and aesthetic liberation made possible by the imagination’s challenge to social and national identities. ❧ In recognizing and celebrating the Creole subject, I draw upon Glissant’s conception of antillanité along with the more recent contributions of the créolité literary movement founders Patrick Chamoiseau, Jean Bernabé, and Raphaël Confiant.  However, in dialogue with critics of créolité’s insistence on exhibitions of Caribbean authenticity such as the Creole language, my work conceives of the Creole outside of Caribbean borders and makes space for her throughout the increasingly globalized world.  My dissertation reasons that the Creole figure can be recognized and identified much like the novel, whose identification does not demand exclusive definition but allows for ambiguity, multiple authorities, and unlimited legitimacy for all to become emperors of invisible cities.