Machado, Elena

The two authors being discussed in this study have chosen to
create characters that face the struggle against the age-old belief system
that the man of the household is the ruler and decision maker. These
authors reconnect with Cuba and its treatment of women by examining a
Cuban woman's role in society. Cristina Garcia and Achy Obejas both
create female characters that step outside the boundaries of traditional
Cuban gender roles. These women writers decidedly write female
narratives that emerge beyond the cultural family dynamic followed for
decades. Finally, the narrative voice is strong and it is female. I chose the
following texts from each author: Dreaming in Cuban and The Aguero
Sisters by Cristina Garcia and Days of Awe and Memory Mambo by Achy
Obejas. The interesting link between these two authors is their creation of
strong exiled and native female characters in their works of fiction.

The purpose of this investigation is to analyze the ways in which the American Western genre has been reworked in an Anglophone Caribbean context. This paper focuses on the role of the cowboy figure as it pertains to both a postcolonial Jamaican context a more globalized, diasporic Anglophone Caribbean setting. The Western genre, while not typically associated with the Caribbean, has tropes that certainly occur in both film and literature. There is not much scholarship that details the importance of this reimagination as a positive association in the region, and I have chosen both the film and novel The Harder They Come by Perry Henzell and Michael Thelwell, respectively, and Praisesong for the Widow by Paule Marshall to trace these ideas. Together, these works provide a multifaceted understanding of how the American Western helps to interpret the Anglophone Caribbean as a participant in an increasingly globalized world.

This dissertation proposes that West Indian contemporary male writers develop
literary authority, or a voice that represents the nation, via a process of individuation.
This process enables the contemporary male writer to unite the disparities of the
matriarchal and patriarchal authorial traditions that inform his development of a
distinctive creative identity. I outline three stages of authorial individuation that are
inspired by Jung’s theory of individuation. The first is the contemporary male writer’s
return to his nationalist forebears’ tradition to dissolve his persona, or identification
with patriarchal authority; Fred D’Aguiar’s “The Last Essay About Slavery” and
Feeding the Ghosts illustrate this stage. The second is his reconciliation of matriarchal
(present) and patriarchal (past) traditions of literary authority via his encounter with his
forebears’ feminized, raced shadow; Robert Antoni’s Blessed Is the Fruit evidences this process. The third is the contemporary male writer’s renunciation of authority defined
by masculinity, which emerges as his incorporation of the anima, or unconscious
feminine; Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women exemplifies this final phase of his
individuation.