Esquilín, Mary Ann Gosser

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.

French literature has undoubtedly exerted a marked influence over Haitian letters. Since the Middle Ages, notable elements of the fantastic, such as loups-garous and talking animals in lais and fables, all the way to the unheimlich narratives of the nineteenth century, are also present in Haitian works with strong overtones of the oral traditions of slave narratives. However, Haitian literature, given its syncretic nature, offers not just an array of talking animals and “magic realist” episodes, but a unique “fantastic being,” the zombie. In turn, these figures have made their way not just into the Haitian folkloric tradition, but infused with political undertones, have become pivotal metaphors for contemporary Haitian writers on the island, as well as for those who write in the diaspora, to explore the nation’s oppressive governments. This dissertation traces the origins of such figures and their creative reincarnations today.