Department of Languages, Linguistics and Comparative Literature

My research centers around French West Indian hip hop music (also called rap) and identity, from its emergence in the 1980s to its evolution in the ensuing years against the backdrop of the Caribbean Francophone literary traditions, as another musical expression of oraliture. By oraliture, we understand a set of unwritten and oral creations representing an era or a community. The dissertation aims to study the appropriation of hip hop music by local artists in the French West Indies (F.W.I.), in particular focusing on the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, because of their geographic, social, political, and cultural settings. Given that these islands have a long-standing tradition of story-telling set to rhythmical patterns, this work analyzes the ways in which ipop Kreyol lyrics highlight the dynamics of the area, paying attention to the aesthetics, the semiotics, and the performance.
Considering hip hop music as part of an oral literature framework allows us to address the questions of identity prevalent in the F.W.I. given their relationship to metropolitan France, the Caribbean, and the U.S.. Caribbean theorists have proposed notions of transculturation, poetics of relation, creolization, and Tout-Monde, among others, to understand fluid identity concepts. The use of Creole in rhythmical patterns found in rap lyrics is at the crossroads of identity building in the F.W.I.. Hip hop music lyrics, a cultural product entrenched in the islands’ oral literary traditions, become a useful means to study the development of a unique French West Indian cultural voice, both on the islands and in the diaspora.

This comparative research identifies and analyzes recurring tropes in the novels Cobra (1972) by Cuban writer Severo Sarduy and La mucama de Omicunlé (2015) by Dominican writer Rita Indiana. Despite the years between the publication of these important Spanish-Caribbean works, they both reveal transformative processes through transgressive writing styles. Seemingly diverse, these novels present a similar plot: a series of violent events that surround the protagonists’ androgyny. Their stories bare a deeper significance as changes to the bodies provoke ruptures that unearth rhizomatic connections with the rest of the surrounding nature, which, of course, has its own histories, different from the ones recorded by humans. Moreover, the novels explore multiplicities and (re)occurrences through times and spaces imperceptibly interconnected. The androgynous rhizomatic trope in contemporary Spanish-Caribbean novels proves to be a significant contribution that leads readers to question biased historical records, conceived to perpetuate coloniality, and dispute heteropatriarchal visions of nature to bring about transcendental changes to the status quo.

Amid the rapid advancements in clinical aesthetics, there lies an intricate gap between the artistic and sensory experience of facial aesthetics and the technical approach of medical sciences. As the field of clinical aesthetics veers further into the realm of the ideal, tensions arise between patient expectations and the practitioner's delivery. Central to this issue is the growing reliance on technology, which often overlooks the immediate sensory experience crucial for aesthetic satisfaction. Drawing inspiration from the arts and humanities, this dissertation introduces "Phenoesthetics" as an epistemological bridge, harmonizing the seemingly disparate domains of sensory experience and scientific analysis. By using visual art, particularly the composite works of the Renaissance artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo, as an illustrative tool, this work seeks to elucidate the dual nature of facial aesthetics perception: the universal, tangible forms and the more abstract, cultural interpretations. By weaving together elements from the arts, humanities, and sciences, this study propounds a Phenoesthetics approach — a comprehensive method designed to enhance understanding and communication in clinical aesthetics. The aim is to provide practitioners with a robust framework, fostering more aligned expectations and improving satisfaction rates in the field of aesthetic medicine.

This thesis analyzed the effects of speaking style, either read or spontaneous speech, on vowel spaces and long-term formant distributions (LTFD), alongside other sociolinguistic effects (sex and age). The results indicated that formant frequencies were indeed modulated by speaking style, with vowel spaces showing centralization during spontaneous speech compared to read speech. LTFD showed an increase in frequency during spontaneous speech over read speech, particularly in the third long-term formant (LTF3). Sex and age were both significant factors for both vowel space and LTFD, with males and older speakers producing lower frequencies. The examination of the effect of speech style, sex and age on vowel space and LTFD allows us to better understand the factors that play a role in speech production.

This thesis analyzes if animacy facilitates the visual recognition of words in Spanish. I compared native-speaker reaction times to Spanish words with animate and inanimate referents in a word-nonword identification task, also known as the lexical decision task. Responses were collected from a database and coded for animacy as well as six lexical and semantic variables known to affect reading times. Linear mixed effects modeling suggested that participants responded to animate words significantly more quickly, independently of factors such as frequency and familiarity. The findings are interpreted from the perspective of parallel distributed processing model of word recognition in Seidenberg and McClelland (1989). The present study highlights the importance of animacy to language processing and presents one avenue through which we can understand which dimensions of the referential world are relevant to the processing and organization of language.

Talmy (2007) was the first to propose a language typology based on the lexicalization patterns of motion verbs. According to his typology, certain languages tend to encode certain elements within the main verb of motion event descriptions. It has been proposed that Spanish and English exist on opposites sides of this typology and Slobin (1996 & 2006) speculates these structural differences may affect what aspects of external events are more salient to speakers of these languages.
The present study investigates the verbal and nonverbal behavior of English monolinguals and Spanish-English bilinguals to see if any differences exist in the aspects of the motion event that they describe in an elicitation task or prefer in a similarity judgement task. This study provides evidence that Spanish-English bilinguals may be less likely to encode manner when speaking in English. The present study provides no evidence that this extends to nonverbal behavior as all groups showed a preference for categorizing motion events based on the manner (e.g., run, walk, crawl, etc.) of motion rather than the path (up, down, left, right, etc.).

This dissertation aims to contextualize the self-taught Sicilian born artist, Tom DiSalvo (1947-2011) among contemporary artists of Italian extraction. It investigates a selection of his corpus of over 300 works of art spanning four decades as an integral contribution to Italian diasporic scholarship. The primarily large-scale paintings, enhanced with underlying textual layers and semiotic translations of famous works of art, reveal distinct ties to American, Italian and hybrid patterns of ethnicity. Much of his work remains unknown in scholarly and public circles, due in part to the limited canon of Italian diasporic visual art (with the exception of film) and to DiSalvo’s own disapproval of the commodification of his art. The project originated with the classification of the artist’s personal artifacts and the interpretation of his canvases displayed in both public and private spaces. The methodology employed in this dissertation is as unique and multifaceted as its topic. I depart from paintings to reveal the man behind the canvas, thanks to the voices and memories of friends and family on both sides of the ocean, anchoring my findings to the foundation of scholarly discussions, and theoretical and critical sources in the disciplines of hybrid cultural studies, Italian and Italian American art and literature, as well as outsider art to verify the intersections between DiSalvo and members of each of these communities.

This interdisciplinary dissertation examines Latinx political self-representation across a variety of narrative forms including fiction, nonfiction, film, and social media. Beginning with identifying points of political intersection and divergence within the imagined Latinx voting bloc incorrectly homogenized in mainstream discourse, the dissertation looks at how narrative empathy and political concerns for a singular issue– the child migrant crisis–play out differently across fiction and nonfiction written narratives. The dissertation then takes a turn towards exploring the lack of prominent Latinx political figures in the cultural imaginary, especially Latinas, by looking back to Latin America for exemplary models, and presenting community organizing as seen in recent filmic representation as an alternative form of political engagement. Finally, it focuses on two Latinx political figures–Oscar Zeta Acosta and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez–who rose to notoriety half a century apart, yet took similar community insider/political outsider approaches to their historic runs for office. Overall, the dissertation stresses the importance of self-representation as a means of creating and controlling narrative empathy, as well as countering a mainstream narrative of a monolithic Latinx bloc that is both politically unengaged and threatening.

This study demonstrates the relationship between intergenerational trauma and domestic space, specifically focusing on how Holocaust survivors’ homes became extensions of their traumatized psyches that their children “inhabited.” Based on my analysis of literature and oral histories of the second generation, my project employs the theory of postmemory to demonstrate how the spatial and temporal conditions of survivor-family homes, along with the domestic practices and objects contained therein, rendered these domestic milieus spaces of traumatic contagion. Postmemorial structures often functioned as spaces that afforded few illusions of familial permanency, thereby familiarizing survivors’ children with an intimate and pervading fear of external threat at a young age, which challenged or precluded feelings of parental protection and refuge within the domestic. I discuss the ways by which the second generation’s inherited perceptions of space—along with their inherited perception of matter and time— structured and structure their perceptions of their domestic lives. This study explores how, in turn, postmemorial structures shaped and shape the second generation’s inherited perceptions of space, matter, and time. As survivors’ traumas were registered in the very space of their homes, their homes functioned as material archives of their Holocaust pasts, creating domestic environments that commonly also wounded their children. In addition to survivors’ unspoken traumas, their spoken narratives of the Holocaust were also imbued in the space of postmemorial structures to such an extent that these homes became the very “framework” or “architecture” of their psychosocial lives. I argue that insofar as survivor-family homes were imaginatively transformed by survivors’ children into the sites of their parents’ traumas—whether they were concentration camps, ghettoes, places of hiding, etc.—their domestic spaces became central technologies that catalyzed and perpetuated the intergenerational transmission of Holocaust trauma and embodied experience. I further argue that the ways by which they describe their home lives constitute indirect expressions of their belated relationships to the Holocaust.

This dissertation investigates the ethics of authorial collaboration in contemporary collaborative women’s writing and its effect on the power dynamics inherent in the writing process. Collaborative writing occupies a continuum, from ethnographic autobiography, in which the writer outranks the generally anonymous subject, to the celebrity “ghostwritten” autobiography, which overturns this hierarchy. This study focuses more narrowly on more covert forms of collaboration implying a differential of symbolic capital that foregrounds asymmetrical writing relationships. Importantly, these asymmetrical relationships cannot be unproblematically reduced to the general (or generic) conception of “coauthorship,” turning instead towards a form of paratextual dialogue that acknowledges the presence of diverse and sometimes conflicting authorial voices that manifest themselves in various ways in different parts of the text.
By focusing on a variety of covert collaborative forms, including so-told narratives from different epochs and traditions, the dissertation will expand our conception of collaborative writing and simultaneously develop a more dialogic notion of authorship, putting in conversation Bakhtinian concepts of dialogism, heteroglossia, and polyphony with feminist theory. The case studies present in the dissertation, ranging from feminist journals of the 1970s to slave narratives, provide the crucial function of offering a profound and carefully nuanced series of contexts in which to examine the deeper moral principles and obligations that tie collaborators to each other. Simultaneously, this analysis aims to start a discussion about privilege in the writing collaborative process as well as issues of minority representation in literature.
The relationship between authorial voices that hold a differential of symbolic capital also invites to reflect on the complicated sociocultural dynamics between socalled “dominant” or “prestige” languages–what Pascale Casanova calls “dominating” languages–and “minority” languages (such as Italian dialects and Guadeloupean Creole). For this reason, starting from the Bakhtinian concept of heteroglossia this dissertation leads to a sociolinguistic analysis of the linguistic habits of collaborators, highlighting how language becomes one of the forms of power imbalance.